DataTransferObject myth-busting
DataTransferObject is one of the most popular design patterns. It has been widely used in archaic Java Enterprise application and some time ago got second live due to growth of RESTful APIs. I don't want to elaborate on DTOs pros (like for example hiding domain logic, etc) because there are whole books talking about it. I just want to cover technological aspects of DTO classes. Usually we create just simple POJO with getters, setters and default constructor. The whole mapping configuration usually limits to @JsonIgnore annotation added on getter we want to skip. It's the simplest way but can we do better? I'll focus on most popular in Java world Jackson Mapper and try to answer 3 basic questions which are usually skipped during development, and which in my opinion can improve the design of the transport layer. 1. Can we skip getters? Yes! Jackson is able to serialize our objects using different strategies. Those strategies are fully customizable on two levels: for