Mixin it up Jackson style

We have already discovered the goodness of Jackson for vending out JSON data in a JAX-RS setup. In many cases, our domain objects have references to other domain objects that are not under our control (e.g. classes from third-party JARs). We can easily add annotations to our domain objects to indicate which fields to ignore, but what do we do for the third party objects? One could choose to write custom bean serializers, but that is pretty onerous on the part of the user and one that requires higher maintenance since it is away from the original class. Here is where Jackson Mixins comes to the rescue.