I know this is old (and I am new to java), but I ran into the same problem. And the answers were not as clear to me as a newbie... so I thought I would add what I learned.
I used a third-party library to aid in the endeavor: org.codehaus.jackson
All of the downloads for this can be found here.
For base JSON functionality, you need to add the following jars to your project's libraries: jackson-mapper-asl and jackson-core-asl
Choose the version your project needs. (Typically you can go with the latest stable build).
Once they are imported in to your project's libraries, add the following import lines to your code:
import org.codehaus.jackson.JsonGenerationException;
import org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException;
import org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper;
With the java object defined and assigned values that you wish to convert to JSON and return as part of a RESTful web service
User u = new User();
u.firstName = "Sample";
u.lastName = "User";
u.email = "[email protected]";
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
try {
// convert user object to json string and return it
return mapper.writeValueAsString(u);
}
catch (JsonGenerationException | JsonMappingException e) {
// catch various errors
e.printStackTrace();
}
The result should looks like this:
{"firstName":"Sample","lastName":"User","email":"[email protected]"}