Parsing without reflection means you have to know the structure of the JSON. All you have to do if read the document and interpret it as fields and values
{ "item": { "name":"Cannonball", "id":2, "price":340 } }
translates into
public class Item {
private String name;
private Integer id;
private Integer price;
}
So you can read the page into a string, get rid of "item": { } and " ", split by , and you will have field:value pairs which you can insert into your Item instances