arrays of composite types, and client drivers like JDBC

Hi,

I'm experimenting with Java client libraries (the usual JDBC and some other
async projects, eg [1]). So far, I'm not finding ways to select/read
composite types without ugly string parsing. The simple cases are okay, but
if I have a column that is an array of composites, the client library might
give me a string for a column value like the following, with no builtin way
to parse it.

{"(10,\"abc \"\" \"\" \"\"\",\"2019-06-14
18:16:48.067969\",t)","(11,foo,\"2019-06-14 18:16:48.067969\",f)"}

Maybe I'm missing the part of the JDBC API that I can use here.

If not, then I'm wondering: is there something inherent in the underlying
PG protocol that makes this difficult for all these client/driver
libraries? In other words, maybe the protocol is sending strings meant for
display, not for parsing as data?

I was hoping I'd find an API like...

create type foo as (age int, color text);
create table t (a foo, b foo[]);
....
var resultSet = conn.prepareStatement("select a,b from
t").executeQuery()
var foos = resultSet.getArray("b")
var foo = foos.getElement(0)
var age = foo.getInt(1)
var color = foo.getString(2)

thanks,
Rob

[1]: https://github.com/cretz/pgnio