For extremely fast Java to JSON (and JSON to Java), see this project:
http://code.google.com/p/json-io/
This code has been used in production for over 2 years, is highly
tuned for speed, serializes anything (no need for Serializable or
Externalizable), works great with Javascript, and does not require any
configuration files, or other external description to serialize.
I have a JSON rpc project that uses json-io as the core for passing
the remote procedure calls (method requests) and passing the return
values. I expect to have this checked in within the next week or two.