I was never able to get this to work simple using annotations. To get it to work, I created a ContextResolver for ObjectMapper, then I added the JSR310Module (update: now it is JavaTimeModule instead), along with one more caveat, which was the need to set write-date-as-timestamp to false. See more at the documentation for the JSR310 module. Here's an example of what I used.

Dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-datatype-jsr310</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.0</version>
</dependency>

^{Note: One problem I faced with this is that the jackson-annotation version pulled in by another dependency, used version 2.3.2, which cancelled out the 2.4 required by the jsr310. What happened was I got a NoClassDefFound for ObjectIdResolver, which is a 2.4 class. So I just needed to line up the included dependency versions}

ContextResolver

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype.jsr310.JSR310Module;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
public class ObjectMapperContextResolver implements ContextResolver<ObjectMapper> {  
    private final ObjectMapper MAPPER;

    public ObjectMapperContextResolver() {
        MAPPER = new ObjectMapper();
        // Now you should use JavaTimeModule instead
        MAPPER.registerModule(new JSR310Module());
        MAPPER.configure(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);
    }

    @Override
    public ObjectMapper getContext(Class<?> type) {
        return MAPPER;
    }  
}

Resource class

@Path("person")
public class LocalDateResource {

    @GET
    @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response getPerson() {
        Person person = new Person();
        person.birthDate = LocalDate.now();
        return Response.ok(person).build();
    }

    @POST
    @Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response createPerson(Person person) {
        return Response.ok(
                DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE.format(person.birthDate)).build();
    }

    public static class Person {
        public LocalDate birthDate;
    }
}

Test

curl -v http://localhost:8080/api/person
Result: {"birthDate":"2015-03-01"}

curl -v -POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{\"birthDate\":\"2015-03-01\"}" http://localhost:8080/api/person
Result: 2015-03-01

See also here for JAXB solution.

UPDATE

The JSR310Module is deprecated as of version 2.7 of Jackson. Instead, you should register the module JavaTimeModule. It is still the same dependency.

update: Spring Boot 2.x doesn't require this configuration anymore. I've written a more up to date answer here.

(This is the way of doing it before Spring Boot 2.x, it might be useful for people working on an older version of Spring Boot)

I finally found here how to do it. To fix it, I needed another dependency:

compile("com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype:jackson-datatype-jsr310:2.4.0")

By including this dependency, Spring will automatically register a converter for it, as described here. After that, you need to add the following to application.properties:

spring.jackson.serialization.write_dates_as_timestamps=false

This will ensure that a correct converter is used, and dates will be printed in the format of 2016-03-16T13:56:39.492

Annotations are only needed in case you want to change the date format.

A similar question is answered here. You may have to add @JsonSerialize(using = LocalDateTimeSerializer.class) to your field.

You can also create a custom serializer like below:

public class CustomLocalDateTimeSerializer extends JsonSerializer<LocalDateTime>{

    @Override
    public void serialize(LocalDateTime dateTime, JsonGenerator generator, SerializerProvider sp)
            throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        String formattedDateTime = dateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-MM-dd")); 
        generator.writeString( formattedDateTime);
    }

}

and use that custom serializer in your LocalDateTime field:

@JsonSerialize(using = CustomLocalDateTimeSerializer.class)
private LocalDateTime w_date; 

The LocalDate is stored in incorrectly in the JSON.

The correct way to fix the problem is to ensure that the ObjectMapper generating the JSON has the JavaTimeModule or the Jdk8Module registered. This ensures that the LocalDate is correctly serialized to a JSON array of [year, month, day].

The brute-force method is to follow the solution that @Roy outlined in another answer, and convert each relevant field manually to a LocalDate. Something along the lines of :

LocalDate date = LocalDate.now()
        .with(ChronoField.YEAR, year)
        .with(ChronoField.MONTH_OF_YEAR, Month.valueOf(month).getValue())
        .with(ChronoField.DAY_OF_MONTH, dayOfMonth);

This is obviously rather error-prone, and not how the classes were intended to be used.