Previously the recommendation when a user wanted to use Gson was to
exclude Jackson from the classpath and add Gson. This worked fine until
the user also want to use the Actuator which requires Jackson. To get
over this hurdle the user could leave Jackson on the classpath and
perform their own HttpMessageConverter configuration and register a
GsonHttpMessageConverter instead of or before any Jackson-based
converter. A little complicated, but it worked.
This commit makes things easier by updating the auto-configuration for
HTTP message converters to prefer Gson when both Gson and Jackson are
on the classpath, i.e. in the presence of both, a
GsonHttpMessageConverter will be auto-configured and a
MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter won’t be. This allows an
application to easily use Gson while allowing the Actuator to continue
to use Jackson.
Closes gh-2247