Jettison 1.3.3 is out

Jettison 1.3.3 has been released earlier this month, please check the Download page.

This release ships a better MappedXMLStreamReader: arrays to be mapped to primitive collections in JAXB beans can be correctly processed without the loss of the data, some if its methods dealing with text will work properly as expected and the callers can identify an absolute position of the first illegal JSON character after XMLStreamException has been thrown.

As usual, I'd like to thank the users who have reported the issues against Jettison and would like to encourage to get the patches provided.

I think over the time it has become clearer to me why Jettison is still being used, at least by some of CXF users, even though such powerful and popular processors as Jackson exist. Jettison is a very lightweight library, it has just few basic STAX XMLStreamReader and XMLStreamWriter implementations: this alone is not sufficient to produce a perfect JSON. But in CXF at least Jettison can be customized a lot to make it produce if not perfect but close enough JSON sequences.

This is what keeps it visible really in CXF land at least IMHO - the fact that the users can use it to write or read simple sequences (with many JSON consumers actually expecting simple enough sequences) but also nearly completely control the way a given sequence is produced or consumed. For example, people are talking about backward and forward compatibility with respect to processing XML - same can be achieved for JSON in CXF, all without code-related changes.

This is where its niche is, a bridge between JAXB and JSON, simple to medium complexity sequences, the possibility of the easy enough customization.

If you work with Jettison: please test the latest release and provide the feedback, thanks