The Jackson data binding documentation indicates that Jackson supports deserialising "Arrays of all supported types" but I can't figure out the exact syntax for this. For a single object I would do this: //json input { "id" : "junk", "stuff" : "things" } //Java MyClass instance = objectMapper.readValue(json, MyClass.class); Now for an array I want to do this: //json input [{ "id" : "junk", "stuff"