Java 8 LocalDate Jackson format

@JsonSerialize and @JsonDeserialize worked fine for me. They eliminate the need to import the additional jsr310 module:

@JsonDeserialize(using = LocalDateDeserializer.class)  
@JsonSerialize(using = LocalDateSerializer.class)  
private LocalDate dateOfBirth;

Deserializer:

public class LocalDateDeserializer extends StdDeserializer<LocalDate> {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    protected LocalDateDeserializer() {
        super(LocalDate.class);
    }


    @Override
    public LocalDate deserialize(JsonParser jp, DeserializationContext ctxt)
            throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        return LocalDate.parse(jp.readValueAs(String.class));
    }

}

Serializer:

public class LocalDateSerializer extends StdSerializer<LocalDate> {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    public LocalDateSerializer(){
        super(LocalDate.class);
    }

    @Override
    public void serialize(LocalDate value, JsonGenerator gen, SerializerProvider sp) throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        gen.writeString(value.format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_LOCAL_DATE));
    }
}

I was never able to get this to work simple using annotations. To get it to work, I created a ContextResolver for ObjectMapper, then I added the JSR310Module (update: now it is JavaTimeModule instead), along with one more caveat, which was the need to set write-date-as-timestamp to false. See more at the documentation for the JSR310 module. Here's an example of what I used.

Dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-datatype-jsr310</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.0</version>
</dependency>

^{Note: One problem I faced with this is that the jackson-annotation version pulled in by another dependency, used version 2.3.2, which cancelled out the 2.4 required by the jsr310. What happened was I got a NoClassDefFound for ObjectIdResolver, which is a 2.4 class. So I just needed to line up the included dependency versions}

ContextResolver

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype.jsr310.JSR310Module;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
public class ObjectMapperContextResolver implements ContextResolver<ObjectMapper> {  
    private final ObjectMapper MAPPER;

    public ObjectMapperContextResolver() {
        MAPPER = new ObjectMapper();
        // Now you should use JavaTimeModule instead
        MAPPER.registerModule(new JSR310Module());
        MAPPER.configure(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);
    }

    @Override
    public ObjectMapper getContext(Class<?> type) {
        return MAPPER;
    }  
}

Resource class

@Path("person")
public class LocalDateResource {

    @GET
    @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response getPerson() {
        Person person = new Person();
        person.birthDate = LocalDate.now();
        return Response.ok(person).build();
    }

    @POST
    @Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response createPerson(Person person) {
        return Response.ok(
                DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE.format(person.birthDate)).build();
    }

    public static class Person {
        public LocalDate birthDate;
    }
}

Test

curl -v http://localhost:8080/api/person
Result: {"birthDate":"2015-03-01"}

curl -v -POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{\"birthDate\":\"2015-03-01\"}" http://localhost:8080/api/person
Result: 2015-03-01

---

See also here for JAXB solution.

UPDATE

The JSR310Module is deprecated as of version 2.7 of Jackson. Instead, you should register the module JavaTimeModule. It is still the same dependency.

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
mapper.registerModule(new JavaTimeModule());
mapper.configure(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);