jersey client that consumes json-array won't work

Question

I know there's some answers out there but none of them really solved my problem. I'm really glad for all the input I can get. Thx in advance.

The Service I try to consume is a jersey rs 1.8 which I try to 'GET'. The Service is annotated with '@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)' and returns the following:

[{"projRnd":"1","firstname":"Jadeveon","lastname":"Clowney"},{"projRnd":"1","firstname":"Greg","lastname":"Robinson"}, ..]

Now my Service Consumer does the following:

import org.json.simple.JSONArray;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource;
...
WebResource webResource = client.resource(URL to my ws);
JSONArray jsonObjects = webResource.accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE).get(JSONArray.class);

Tomcat says:

HTTP Status 500
javax.servlet.ServletException: com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientHandlerException: A message body reader for Java class org.json.simple.JSONArray, and Java type class org.json.simple.JSONArray, and MIME media type application/json was not found
...

To clarify ... the client runs on a vaadin application in the frontend ... the HTTP 500 is not from the backend.

My pom.xml sure has the right dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-server</artifactId>
    <version>1.8</version>
</dependency>

Like I said ... all the Input is much appreciated.

Answer 1

.. so I solved the Problem... first of all you shouldn't do something like:

JSONArray jsonObjects = webResource.accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE).get(JSONArray.class);

I changed the service so the response looks like:

{"prospectList":[{"projRnd":"1","firstname":"Jadeveon","lastname":"Clowney"},{"projRnd":"1","firstname":"Greg","lastname":"Robinson"}, ..]}

The way to get the JSONArray from this is pretty straight forward with a JSONParser which I didn't even try to use in the first place (FAIL!).

ClientResponse response = webResource.accept("application/json")
        .type("application/json").get(ClientResponse.class);
String s = response.getEntity(String.class);
JSONParser parser = new JSONParser();
Object obj = parser.parse(s);
JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject) obj;
JSONArray jsonArray = (JSONArray) jsonObject.get("prospectList");

the returning jsonArray is iterable and the attributes of each element can now be accessed:

(String) jsonObj.get("firstname");