title: Parse JSON String into raw Java types using Jackson?
body: <p>I would like to parse some JSON string the represents either an array or a map in the simplest possible way. I have the whole JSON string, no streaming is needed.</p>
  
  <p>What I would like to do is something as similar as possible to this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Object obj = parseJSON(theString);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Where obj would then hold an instance of either a Map or a List (I cannot know in advance which). The JSON object can be arbitrarily nested with maps and arrays but all types will be representable as basic Java types: String, Integer, Double, Boolean plus Map and ArrayList, nothing else.</p>
  
  <p>All the simple examples I have found so far require me to know what the type is and which types I want, but I want to let all this do the JSON parser since I simply will not know in advance what I get.</p>
  
  <p>If Jackson is not the best library to do this, what else could I use? </p>