I was having a very similar problem, and it turned out to be quite simple; my client wasn't including a Jackson dependency, even though the code all compiled correctly, the auto-magic converters for JSON weren't being included. See this RestTemplate-related solution.
In short, I added a Jackson dependency to my pom.xml and it just worked:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
<version>2.5.1</version>
</dependency>