title: How to parse JSON+HAL response into POJO
body: <p>Recently I am investigating Spring Boot. I did a simple JPA + DATA + REST spring-boot application. For this initial creation...</p>
  
  <pre><code>    User user = new User();
      user.setFirstName("fname");
      user.setLastName("lname");
      user.setId(1);
      List&lt;Item&gt; items = new ArrayList&lt;Item&gt;();
      Item item = new Item();
      item.setName("item1");
      item.setPattern("pattern1");
      Item item2 = new Item();
      item2.setName("item2");
      item2.setPattern("pattern2");
      itemRepository.save(item);
      itemRepository.save(item2);
      items.add(item);
      items.add(item2);
      user.setItems(items);
      userRepository.save(user);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...the REST interface provides HAL specific responses like this.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ curl http://localhost:8080/user
  {
    "_links" : {
      "self" : {
        "href" : "http://localhost:8080/user{?page,size,sort}",
        "templated" : true
      },
      "search" : {
        "href" : "http://localhost:8080/user/search"
      }
    },
    "_embedded" : {
      "user" : [ {
        "firstName" : "fname",
        "lastName" : "lname",
        "_links" : {
          "self" : {
            "href" : "http://localhost:8080/user/1"
          },
          "items" : {
            "href" : "http://localhost:8080/user/1/items"
          }
        }
      } ]
    },
    "page" : {
      "size" : 20,
      "totalElements" : 1,
      "totalPages" : 1,
      "number" : 0
    }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I want to parse JSON+HAL response to get the User object, but I cannot find a clear example of doing this scenario in java. </p>
  
  <p>Could anyone help me? Thanks!</p>