Overview

This Jackson extension handles reading and writing of data encoded in Smile data format ("binary JSON"). It extends standard Jackson streaming API (JsonFactory, JsonParser, JsonGenerator), and as such works seamlessly with all the higher level data abstractions (data binding, tree model, and pluggable extensions).

Status

Module has been mature since Jackson 1.6, and is used widely (over 150 projects), often as a dynamically configurable alternative to textual JSON.

It also works very well for use cases like caching, especially when databinding is configured to serialize POJOs as Arrays which can further reduce size of serialized objects.

Maven dependency

To use this module on Maven-based projects, use following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-dataformat-smile</artifactId>
  <version>2.16.0</version>
</dependency>

(or whatever version is most up-to-date at the moment)

Usage

Basic usage is by using either SmileMapper instead of ObjectMapper, or for low-level handling using SmileFactory in places where you would usually use JsonFactory:

SmileMapper mapper = new SmileMapper();
// (or can construct factory, configure instance with 'SmileParser.Feature'
// and 'SmileGenerator.Feature' first)
SomeType value = ...;
byte[] smileData = mapper.writeValueAsBytes(value);
SomeType otherValue = mapper.readValue(smileData, SomeType.class);

Related

Smile-format discussion group
Non-java Smile codecs (for interoperability):
- C: libsmile (with wrappers for Ruby, Perl)
- Clojure: Cheshire
- Javascript: smile-js
- Python PySmile

Uh oh!