(code name: Smiley Bean)

JacksonHome 1.6 was released on September 6th 2010, about 6 months after JacksonRelease15.

It is classified as a "minor" update over 1.5, since it will be mostly backwards compatible (hence not a "major" version bump), but will introduce new features (hence not a "patch" release).

This release had ambitious goals for extending functionality into new areas: both with respect to kinds of use cases supported (bean materialization, ability to update ("merge") existing objects), data types ("Smile" binary format) and third party libraries (parent/child relationship support for ORM. But additionally it significantly improved existing functionality, so that working with Java Enums is more convenient; support for generic types is even more powerful; and JacksonTreeModel support is more convenient.

Following is the list of functionality that was implemented for this release.

• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-41: Add support for JacksonFeatureMaterializedBeans: ability to generate classes that implement interfaces (and abstract classes) for deserialization, in cases where no other mappings exist.
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-235: JacksonFeatureBiDirReferences using declarative method(s) (especially useful/important for ORM like Hibernate, iBatis)
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-264: Ability to JacksonFeatureUpdateValue; to read and bind JSON content as properties of existing beans. This is done by using ObjectMapper.updatingReader()" (and reader.readValue(source) on resulting reader object)
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-331: Add support for http://wiki.fasterxml.com/SmileFormat; used with new SmileFactory (a sub-type of JsonFactory to use with Smile format)

• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-210: Add methods in JsonNode for JacksonFeatureTreeFindValue of named property
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-212: Allow using Enum.toString() as external serialization instead of Enum.value()
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-257: Allow registering subtypes for JacksonPolymorphicDeserialization (using ObjectMapper.registerSubtypes()).
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-261: @JsonView now implies that the associated thing is a property (regardless of its visibility), to reduce amount of annotations needed when exposing non-public fields.
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-282: Add SerializationConfig.Feature.CLOSE_CLOSEABLE to force calling value.close() on serialization. Meaning that if you want to have automatic resource cleanup for root-level values objects, it is easy to enable.
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-287: Add JsonParser.releaseBufferedContent() for pushing back buffered but unused content, usually after parsing all content of interest (but not necessarily whole stream).
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-292: Add JacksonFeatureAnyGetter to allow convenient serialization of properties bound using @JsonAnySetter (on deserialization).
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-300: JsonParser.Feature.ALLOW_BACKSLASH_ESCAPING_ANY_CHARACTER to make parser accept any all possible backslash-escapes.
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-302: Add JsonNode.has() for more convenient checking of whether JSON Object or Array node has specified property or element.
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-316: Add SerializationConfig.Feature.WRITE_NULL_MAP_VALUES, for suppressing writing of null-valued Map entries.

Following features were considered for inclusion, but deferred due to time constraints

• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JACKSON-163: Add ser/deser feature for ObjectMapper to allow "wrapped" output (mostly for JAXB compatibility)

CategoryJackson