So one overall observation is that I don't think it's necessary to introduce gson to the project.  There is a class `JsonNodeHelper` in src/test/org/cru/crs/utils that can be used to go b/w a Jackson `JsonNode` & `String` and vice versa.  As it is, I don't think it's threadsafe, but I could fix that and move it to the src/main/java folder.  That should cover for where gson is being used.