In some domains of programming it’s common to want to write a data structure or algorithm that can work with elements of many different types, such as a generic list or a sorting algorithm that only needs a comparison function.
My existing research is mainly focused on lightweight generic programming techniques and the essence of (OO-style) design patterns. * Modular Visitor Components: A Practical Solution to the Expression Families Problem Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira ECOOP 2009. * Scala for Generic Programmers Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira, Jeremy Gibbons In Ralf Hinze, editor, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Generic Programming (WGP'08) July 2008. * Objects to Unify Type Classes and GADTs Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira, Martin Sulzmann ICFP 2008
Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM) applies concepts of datatype-generic programming to define generic functions for supported datatypes using type classes.
Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.
There are a few open-source projects that can convert Java objects to JSON. However, most of them require that you place Java annotations in your classes something that you can not do if you do not have access to the source-code. Most also do not fully support the use of Java Generics. Gson considers both of these as very important design goals.
Gson Goals
Provide simple toJson() and fromJson() methods to convert Java objects to JSON and vice-versa
Allow pre-existing unmodifiable objects to be converted to and from JSON
Extensive support of Java Generics
Allow custom representations for objects
Support arbitrarily complex objects (with deep inheritance hierarchies and extensive use of generic types)
Gson Documentation
Gson API: Javadocs for the current Gson release
Gson user guide: This guide contains examples on how to use Gson in your code.
Gson Roadmap: Details on upcoming releases
Gson design document: This document discusses issues we faced while designing Gson. It also include a comparison of Gson with other Java libraries that can be used for Json conversion
Please use the google-gson Google Group to discuss Gson, or to post questions.
When a generic type is instantiated, the compiler translates those types by a technique called type erasure — a process where the compiler removes all information related to type parameters and type arguments within a class or method. Type erasure enables Java applications that use generics to maintain binary compatibility with Java libraries and applications that were created before generics.