[forge-dev] Opinion poll: Jackson vs Errai

[Thomas Frühbeck]

Hi,

during experiments extending a generated aerogear application I found that
  - the current integration of JSON via Jackson is kinda creative hack
  - not easily portable to recent releases of Jackson (see above)
  - does not make use of annotation driven UI/ser/deserializ. processing

During my investigations on upgrade possibilities to modern Jackson I realized, that Errai is a very powerful and complete framework well worth being featured 
in Forge's scaffold.
As I am not really deep into Jackson/JSON/Rest yet I would like to ask for your opinion on this.

Another question regarding use of annotations in a scaffold:
Especially regarding modern Errai/Jackson annotations are an easy means to control the UI / (De-)Serialization, e.g. when working with entities, I think it is 
necessary to use persistence-based entity instantiation before deserialization, to avoid loss of data if an incomplete entity is desrialized and persisted by 
merge().

Do you think it acceptable to actively insert annotations into entity code - possibly by a scaffold command like "scaffold applyAnnotations"?

In my opinion this could provide interesting best practice propagation for novices like me.

Thanks,
Thomas