Base class for all JSON nodes, which form the basis of JSON Tree Model that Jackson implements. One way to think of these nodes is to consider them similar to DOM nodes in XML DOM trees.
As a general design rule, most accessors ("getters") are included in this base class, to allow for traversing structure without type casts. Most mutators, however, need to be accessed through specific sub-classes (such as org.codehaus.jackson.node.ObjectNode
and org.codehaus.jackson.node.ArrayNode
). This seems sensible because proper type information is generally available when building or modifying trees, but less often when reading a tree (newly built from parsed JSON content).
Actual concrete sub-classes can be found from package {@link org.codehaus.jackson.node}, which is in 'mapper' jar (whereas this class is in 'core' jar, since it is declared as nominal type for operations in {@link ObjectCodec})