jyson

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h1. The past, present and future of jyson.

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h2. Past

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As you may know, "JSON":http://json.org is a *lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write*.

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I "wrote this JSON codec":http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/json-rpc/message/85 when I first came across JSON, and realised that it was the perfect antidote for the complexity and heavy weight of XML, at least in terms of structured data-interchange.

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I intended to publish it as open source, but didn't get around to doing that until recently.

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h2. JSON in the python standard library.

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Back in 2008, I was working on a "commercial contract":http://www.newbay.com/pva.php where we were writing a "REST":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer and "AJAX":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) based system in Java and javascript, with both "jython":http://www.jython.org and "groovy":http://groovy.codehaus.org used for testing.

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I realised then that JSON had become such a commonly used format that it was an important omission that python did not have a JSON codec in the standard library, and "suggested on the python web-sig":http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2008-March/003316.html that a JSON codec should be added to the standard library. At the time, there were "multiple competing implementations of JSON codecs for python":http://blog.hill-street.net/?p=7 .

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It had been my original hope that the authors of these codecs and other interested parties could "collaborate on forming a standard interface for JSON codecs":http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2008-March/003332.html that all python|jython|ironpython JSON codecs could implement, and John Millikin "tried to start such an effort":http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2008-March/003332.html .

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But Guido, the python "BDFL":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDFL "disagreed":http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2008-March/003339.html, and blessed what was at that time the most popular python JSON codec, "simplejson":http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson, written by "Bob Ippolito":http://bob.pythonmac.org/ . Bob contributed simplejson to the python standard library, and it became the "json module in cpython 2.6":http://docs.python.org/library/json.html

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h2. Future

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My intention for Jyson is to

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  # Modify it so that it complies fully with the API of the "cpython json module":http://docs.python.org/library/json.html

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  # Contribute it to the jython project so that jython has a fast pure-java implementation of the json module.

JysonPastFuture