Switching JAX-RS serializer in payara

When working with Payara I stumble every once in a while over JSON-serialization issues. Payara v4 uses MOXy as default provider while Payara v5 comes with JsonB-support which apparently makes use of Yasson.

Although, after moving from v4 to v5 I’m fine with the JsonB-default it may still be useful to use Jackson as JSON provider instead of the default one (to be honest, many things just worked out-of-the-box with Jackson like reflective access to props (no extra getter necessary) or support for Maps etc.).

So, there are many useful hints out there where this answer from Ondro Mihályi himself is probably the most useful one. He mentions the getProperties-method which I perfer to use in my projects instead of the more explicitly shown descriptor-based approaches.

@ApplicationPath("api")
public class BDQVApplication extends javax.ws.rs.core.Application {
    @Override
    public Map<String, Object> getProperties() {
        Map<String, Object> props = new HashMap<>();
        props.put("jersey.config.jsonFeature", "JacksonFeature");
        return props;
    }
    ...
}

the equivalent can be achieved declaratively i.e. via your web.xml:

<context-param>
    <param-name>jersey.config.jsonFeature</param-name>
    <param-value>JacksonFeature</param-value>
</context-param>

This solution works seemlessly in both verisons of Payara - v4 and v5.