How to change Jackson version in JAX-RS app (WebSphere Liberty)

Question

I am migrating a JAX-RS application from WebSphere 8.0 to WebSphere Liberty 8.5.5.

In WebSphere 8.0, Jackson was provided by WebSphere. I can find jackson-core

Answer 1

Yes, WebSphere Liberty uses an older version of Jackson than traditional WAS. We'll need to get that fixed!

In the mean time, one other possibility for you would be to use the jaxrs-2.0 feature and then include the newer version of Jackson in your application or shared library.

One of the differences between Liberty's jaxrs-1.1 and jaxrs-2.0 features is that jaxrs-2.0 does not expose the Jackson API packages. So the application's classloader would not be able to load the Jackson classes that ship with Liberty. That means that it would load the classes from your application without needing to do parentLast delegation or other classloader tricks.

Hope this helps, Andy