You can override the toString() method of the bean class to convert object to JSON string

@Override <br>
public String toString() {
    
        String str = "";
        // Converts object to json string using GSON
        // Gson gson = new Gson();
        // str = gson.toJson(this);
        
        //Converts object to json string using Jaxson
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        
        try {
            str = mapper.writeValueAsString(this);
        } catch (Exception exception) {
            log.error(exception);
        }
        return str;

}

I know this is old (and I am new to java), but I ran into the same problem. And the answers were not as clear to me as a newbie... so I thought I would add what I learned.

I used a third-party library to aid in the endeavor: org.codehaus.jackson All of the downloads for this can be found here.

For base JSON functionality, you need to add the following jars to your project's libraries: jackson-mapper-asl and jackson-core-asl

Choose the version your project needs. (Typically you can go with the latest stable build).

Once they are imported in to your project's libraries, add the following import lines to your code:

 import org.codehaus.jackson.JsonGenerationException;
 import org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException;
 import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

With the java object defined and assigned values that you wish to convert to JSON and return as part of a RESTful web service

User u = new User();
u.firstName = "Sample";
u.lastName = "User";
u.email = "sampleU@example.com";

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    
try {
    // convert user object to json string and return it 
    return mapper.writeValueAsString(u);
}
catch (JsonGenerationException | JsonMappingException  e) {
    // catch various errors
    e.printStackTrace();
}

The result should looks like this: {"firstName":"Sample","lastName":"User","email":"sampleU@example.com"}