Akka HTTP Quickstart for Java

JSON marshalling

When exercising the app, you interacted with JSON payloads. How does the example app convert data between JSON format and data that can be used by Java classes? Fur this purposes Akka HTTP has akka.http.javadsl.marshallers.jackson.Jackson

We’re using the Jackson library here, along with akka-http wrapper that provides marshallers Jackson.marshaller().

In most cases you’ll just need to provide the Jackson marshaller to complete call like following complete(StatusCodes.OK, performed, Jackson.marshaller() to be able to product JSON response.

To create objects from JSON you’ll need to create unmarshaller with class as attribute Jackson.unmarshaller(User.class) That will work out of the box where you are using mutable Java Bean style objects with getters and setters but in this sample we have instead used immutable messages and domain model classes which has no other methods than a constructor, the fields are all final and public. To make Jacksson understand how to create such objects from JSON this we need to provide some extra metadata in the form of the annotations @JsonCreator and @JsonProperty:

copysourcepublic final static record User(String name, int age, String countryOfResidence) {}

public final static record Users(List<User> users) {}

While we used Jackson JSON in this example, the API is pluggable and various other libraries can be used. Each library comes with different trade-offs in performance and user-friendlieness. Still Jackson is the default Java marshaller as that is what we expect Java developers to be most familiar with.

Now that we’ve examined the example app thoroughly, let’s test a few remaining use cases.