A plugin for the [Jackson streaming JSON processor v2.6.x] (http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonHome) that adds support for reading and writing JSON objects in the [Rison] (http://mjtemplate.org/examples/rison.html) serialization format. Support for Jackson [v2.1.x] (https://github.com/bazaarvoice/rison/tree/rison-2.1.1), [v2.0.x] (https://github.com/bazaarvoice/rison/tree/rison-2.0.1), and [v1.9.x] (https://github.com/bazaarvoice/rison/tree/rison-1.2) is also available.

Rison expresses the exact same data structures as JSON, but is much more compact and readable than JSON when encoded in a URI.

See https://github.com/Nanonid/rison for more information about Rison.

In your code, create a RisonFactory instead of a JsonFactory. Then read and write objects just as you do regular JSON objects. All the Jackson mapper facilities are available with Rison.

import com.bazaarvoice.jackson.rison.RisonFactory;

ObjectMapper RISON = new ObjectMapper(new RisonFactory());

String string = "(a:0,b:foo,c:'23skidoo')";
Map map = RISON.readValue(json, Map.class);
...
RISON.writeValueAsString(map);

If you know the value you wish to serialize is always an object, you can configure the RisonFactory to omit the containing ( and ) characters.

ObjectMapper O_RISON = new ObjectMapper(new RisonFactory().
    enable(RisonGenerator.Feature.O_RISON).
    enable(RisonParser.Feature.O_RISON));

String string = "a:0,b:foo,c:'23skidoo'";
Map map = O_RISON.readValue(json, Map.class);
...
System.out.println(O_RISON.writeValueAsString(map));

If you know the value you wish to serialize is always an array, you can configure the RisonFactory to omit the containing !( and ) characters.

ObjectMapper A_RISON = new ObjectMapper(new RisonFactory().
    enable(RisonGenerator.Feature.A_RISON).
    enable(RisonParser.Feature.A_RISON));

String string = "item1,item2,item3";
List list = A_RISON.readValue(json, List.class);
...
System.out.println(A_RISON.writeValueAsString(list));

See the [Rison] (http://mjtemplate.org/examples/rison.html) page for implementations in JavaScript, Python and Ruby.