You need to replace @ModelAttribute with @RequestBody and of course have the Jackson 2.x library on the classpath.post
You will also need to add @JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true) to TestResourcespa
@JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true) public class TestResource { //all the rest of your code }
because the Link you are posting contains properties that the Link object does not contain.rest
As was very correctly mentioned by OP, the @JsonIgnoreProperties annotation needs to be imported from com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation not from org.codehaus.jackson.annotate since the latter is from Jackson 1.xcode