Yes, the Jackson manual parser design is quite different from other libraries. In particular, you will notice that JsonNode has most of the functions that you would typically associate with array nodes from other APIs. As such, you do not need to cast to an ArrayNode to use. Here's an example:

JSON:

{
    "objects" : ["One", "Two", "Three"]
}

Code:

final String json = "{\"objects\" : [\"One\", \"Two\", \"Three\"]}";

final JsonNode arrNode = new ObjectMapper().readTree(json).get("objects");
if (arrNode.isArray()) {
    for (final JsonNode objNode : arrNode) {
        System.out.println(objNode);
    }
}

Output:

"One"
"Two"
"Three"

Note the use of isArray to verify that the node is actually an array before iterating. The check is not necessary if you are absolutely confident in your data structure, but it's available should you need it (and this is no different from most other JSON libraries).

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
List<Employee> e = new ArrayList<Employee>();
ArrayNode array = mapper.valueToTree(e);
ObjectNode companyNode = mapper.valueToTree(company);
companyNode.putArray("Employee").addAll(array);
JsonNode result = mapper.createObjectNode().set("company", companyNode);

Assuming that a row is one of the entries in a ArrayNode the following simple approach may be useful. It uses the JsonNode abstraction instead of a series of nested Map objects which I personally prefer since JsonNode provides a series of utility methods that are helpful when dealing with this kind of data (data where the structure is possibly unknown or very dynamic so that it can't be easily transformed to a POJO).

The testcase below illustrates how to find the number of rows and how to print the values. To get hold of the values the method JsonNode.elements() is used and the number of rows is simply a call to the size()-method.

public class ArrayNodeTest {
    @Test
    public void verifySizeAndPrintRows() throws IOException {
        final String jsonStr =
                "[{\"key11\":\"value11\",\"key12\":\"value12\"},\n" +
                        "{\"key21\":\"value21\",\"key22\":\"value22\"},\n" +
                        "{\"keyn1\":\"valuen1\",\"keyn2\":\"valuen2\"}]";

        final ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        final JsonNode jsonNode = mapper.readTree(jsonStr);

        // Verify size
        Assert.assertEquals(3, jsonNode.size());

        // And print rows
        for (final JsonNode row : jsonNode) {
            final Iterable<JsonNode> iterable = () -> row.elements();
            iterable.forEach(elem -> System.out.println(elem.asText()));
        }
    }
}

Acquire an ObjectReader with ObjectMapper#readerFor(TypeReference) using a TypeReference describing the typed collection you want. Then use ObjectReader#readValue(JsonNode) to parse the JsonNode (presumably an ArrayNode).

For example, to get a List<String> out of a JSON array containing only JSON strings

CopyObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
// example JsonNode
JsonNode arrayNode = mapper.createArrayNode().add("one").add("two");
// acquire reader for the right type
ObjectReader reader = mapper.readerFor(new TypeReference<List<String>>() {
});
// use it
List<String> list = reader.readValue(arrayNode);

The TypeFactory in Jackson allows to map directly to collections and other complex types:

String json = "[ \"abc\", \"def\" ]";
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

List<String> list = mapper.readValue(json, TypeFactory.defaultInstance().constructCollectionType(List.class, String.class));