Ehhhh...it works okay but the same fundamental serialization problem exists. The fact that dict can be roughly equivalent to JSON helps, but as soon as you start including more complex types you're going to have to use something to handle serialization/deserialization. Which really isn't that complex with Java if you're using a few convenience libraries: gson, orika/mapstruct, lombok all make it a lot less painful to write this kind of boilerplate serialization code.