When I am running my web project from Eclipse on Tomcat 8 with JDK 8 everything works flawlessly, but once I build this project and deploy the WAR to Tomcat 8 on the server
Looks like it's a problem with dependency versions
com.sun.jersey jersey-json 1.17.1
The above should match the same version as all your other Jersey dependencies. So just change it to 1.19.
1.19