Using Gson with Interface Types

Genson library provides support for polymorphic types by default. Here is how it would work:

// tell genson to enable polymorphic types support
Genson genson = new Genson.Builder().setWithClassMetadata(true).create();

// json value will be {"@class":"mypackage.LoginRequest", ... other properties ...}
String json = genson.serialize(someRequest);
// the value of @class property will be used to detect that the concrete type is LoginRequest
Request request = genson.deserialize(json, Request.class);

You can also use aliases for your types.

// a better way to achieve the same thing would be to use an alias
// no need to use setWithClassMetadata(true) as when you add an alias Genson 
// will automatically enable the class metadata mechanism
genson = new Genson.Builder().addAlias("loginRequest", LoginRequest.class).create();

// output is {"@class":"loginRequest", ... other properties ...}
genson.serialize(someRequest);

Polymorphic mapping of the type described is not available in Gson without some level of custom coding. There is an extension type adapter available as an extra that provides a bulk of the functionality you are looking for, with the caveat that the polymorphic sub-types need to be declared to the adapter ahead of time. Here is an example of its use:

public interface Response {}

public interface Request {
    public Response process();
}

public class LoginRequest implements Request {
    private String userName;
    private String password;

    // Constructors, getters/setters, overrides
}

public class PingRequest implements Request {
    private String host;
    private Integer attempts;

    // Constructors, getters/setters, overrides
}

public class RequestTest {

    @Test
    public void testPolymorphicSerializeDeserializeWithGSON() throws Exception {
        final TypeToken<List<Request>> requestListTypeToken = new TypeToken<List<Request>>() {
        };

        final RuntimeTypeAdapterFactory<Request> typeFactory = RuntimeTypeAdapterFactory
                .of(Request.class, "type")
                .registerSubtype(LoginRequest.class)
                .registerSubtype(PingRequest.class);

        final Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().registerTypeAdapterFactory(
                typeFactory).create();

        final List<Request> requestList = Arrays.asList(new LoginRequest(
                "bob.villa", "passw0rd"), new LoginRequest("nantucket.jones",
                "crabdip"), new PingRequest("example.com", 5));

        final String serialized = gson.toJson(requestList,
                requestListTypeToken.getType());
        System.out.println("Original List: " + requestList);
        System.out.println("Serialized JSON: " + serialized);

        final List<Request> deserializedRequestList = gson.fromJson(serialized,
                requestListTypeToken.getType());

        System.out.println("Deserialized list: " + deserializedRequestList);
    }
}

Note that you don't actually need to define the type property on the individual Java objects - it exists only in the JSON.

Assuming that the different possible JSON requests you may have are not extremely different to each other, I suggest a different approach, simpler in my opinion.

Let's say that you have these 3 different JSON requests:

{
    "type":"LOGIN",
    "username":"someuser",
    "password":"somepass"
}
////////////////////////////////
{
    "type":"SOMEREQUEST",
    "param1":"someValue",
    "param2":"someValue"
}
////////////////////////////////
{
    "type":"OTHERREQUEST",
    "param3":"someValue"
}

Gson allows you to have a single class to wrap all the possible responses, like this:

public class Request { 
  @SerializedName("type")   
  private String type;
  @SerializedName("username")
  private String username;
  @SerializedName("password")
  private String password;
  @SerializedName("param1")
  private String param1;
  @SerializedName("param2")
  private String param2;
  @SerializedName("param3")
  private String param3;
  //getters & setters
}

By using the annotation @SerializedName, when Gson try to parse the JSON request, it just look, for each named attribute in the class, if there's a field in the JSON request with the same name. If there's no such field, the attribute in the class is just set to null.

This way you can parse many different JSON responses using only your Request class, like this:

Gson gson = new Gson();
Request request = gson.fromJson(jsonString, Request.class);

Once you have your JSON request parsed into your class, you can transfer the data from the wrap class to a concrete XxxxRequest object, something like:

switch (request.getType()) {
  case "LOGIN":
    LoginRequest req = new LoginRequest(request.getUsername(), request.getPassword());
    break;
  case "SOMEREQUEST":
    SomeRequest req = new SomeRequest(request.getParam1(), request.getParam2());
    break;
  case "OTHERREQUEST":
    OtherRequest req = new OtherRequest(request.getParam3());
    break;
}

Note that this approach gets a bit more tedious if you have many different JSON requests and those requests are very different to each other, but even so I think is a good and very simple approach...