Although you can put an annotation for each date field, is better to do a global configuration for your object mapper. If you use jackson you can configure your spring as follow:
<bean id="jacksonObjectMapper" class="com.company.CustomObjectMapper" />
<bean id="jacksonSerializationConfig" class="org.codehaus.jackson.map.SerializationConfig"
factory-bean="jacksonObjectMapper" factory-method="getSerializationConfig" >
</bean>
For CustomObjectMapper:
public class CustomObjectMapper extends ObjectMapper {
public CustomObjectMapper() {
super();
configure(Feature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);
setDateFormat(new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss 'GMT'ZZZ (z)"));
}
}
Of course, SimpleDateFormat can use any format you need.