JSON Support with Programming Languages
Each major programming language can incorporate JSON, which can be through either libraries or native support. However, no language can surpass JavaScript for parsing this data interchange format, which translates it directly into an object literal.
JSON is a popular as XML. Thus, each major language has one or more commonly used powerful libraries for formatting and parsing data in JSON format. Typically, only following two core functionalities are required:
- Parse: Converts JSON data into the supported data structure of corresponding language, such as array, hash, or dictionary.
- Format: Converts array, hash, or dictionary to JSON text.
Developers can easily find these functionalities for almost any modern language. For instance, Ruby incorporates JSON gem, Objective-C supports JSONKit, and Microsoft .NET Framework has Json.NET. Most of these libraries are fast and efficient, considering their extensive use and frequent optimizations over time.
While comparing various languages, it might be pointed out by some developers that using JSON in a C# or Java language is not practical. This is because the idioms supports statically typed classes and not objects of Dictionary or HashMap type. As a result, for generating JSON data, developers are required to use a library along with a custom code for converting these data structures to static type instances. Hence, there are some libraries created for this purpose. For instance, the Gson library from Google is designed for transforming JSON data to Java objects directly.
Gson
Gson is an open-source Java library for transforming an object in Java to JSON data and vice-versa. For this purpose, it offers easy means such as constructor (Factory Method) and toString(). This library also functions well with arbitrary Java objects, involving the pre-existing ones whose source code is not available with you. Following are the goals of Gson:
- Converting already existing not-modifiable objects to and from JSON
- Permitting custom representations for objects
- Outputting legible and compact JSON data
Gson is capable of deserializing string of more than 25MB, deserializing 87,000 objects, and serializing of 1.4 million objects without any issues. Its 1.4 version has increased the deserialization bar from 80KB to more than 11MB, applicable for array and collections in bytes.
It is convenient to learn and use Gson. A developer needs to know two methods namely, toJson() and fromJson(). The toJson() method is used for transforming a Java object to JSON data whereas fromJson() for converting JSON data to an object in Java.
