I'm looking for a super simple JSON or YAML library (not particularly bothered which one) written in Java, and can be used in both GWT on the client, and in its original Java form on the server.

What I'm trying to do is this: I have my models, which are shared between the client and the server, and these are the primary source of data interchange. I want to design the web service in between to be as simple as possible, and decided to take the RESTful approach.

My problem is that I know our application will grow substantially in the future, and writing all the getters, setters, serialization, factories, etc. by hand fills me with absolute dread. So in order to avoid it, I decided to implement annotations to keep track of attributes on the models.

The reason I can't just serialize everything directly, using GWT's own one, or one which works through reflection, is because we need a certain amount of logic going on in the serialization process. I.e. whether references to other models get serialized during the serialization of the original model, or whether an ID is just passed, and general simple things like that. I've then written an annotation processor to preprocess my shared models and generate an implementing class with all the getters, setters, serialization, lazy-loading, etc.

To make a long story short, I need some type of simple YAML or JSON library, which allows me to encode and decode manually, so I can generate this code through my annotation processor. I have had a look around the interwebs, but every single one I ran into supported some reflection which, while all fine and dandy, make it pretty much useless for GWT. And in the case of GWT's own JSON library, it uses JSNI for speed purposes, making it useless server side.

One solution I did think about involved writing writing two sets of serialization methods on the models, one for the client and one for the server, but I'd rather not do that.

Also, I'm pretty new to GWT, and even though I have done a lot of Java, it was back in the 1.2 days, so it's a bit rusty. So if you think I'm going about this problem completely the wrong way, I'm open to suggestions.