Since its first release in 2017, Kotlin has grown by leaps and bounds within the JVM community, becoming the go-to programming language for Android development as well as a first-class citizen in major JVM tools like Spring, JUnit, Gradle, and more. This article will explore the development and performance characteristics of four different options for working with the serialization of JSON messages – GSON, Jackson, JSON-B, and Kotlinx Serialization, using both the Kotlin programming language and some of the unique features that Kotlin offers compared to its counterpart language, Java.

However, there are some scenarios for which every CPU cycle counts, and the faster the serialization mechanism can work, the better. For some web services, the thought put towards this part of the flow of data is focused solely on how to configure the serialization mechanism so that it works properly. In any web service that receives and transmits data to and from a server, the first and last events will usually be transforming the data from the format used by the web request into the format that the web server will handle, and vice versa these operations are called deserialization and serialization, respectively.

Serializable kotlin data class