I noticed that Jolokia is still based on the old json-simple library for JSON manipulations. json-simple is no longer maintained, of which the last release was more than ten years ago. We should migrate to a newer and maintained JSON library such as JSON-java. JSON-java seems to have quite similar API to json-simple and appears mostly compatible, so migration shouldn't be so hard.

There are outstanding issues with json-simple as well, for instance:

• Empty array handling is broken in the current version of json-simple #226

Hopefully they might be resolved by migrating to JSON-java as well.