The past, present and future of jyson.¶

Past¶

As you may know, JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write.

I wrote this JSON codec 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.

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

JSON in the python standard library.¶

Back in 2008, I was working on a commercial contract where we were writing a REST and AJAX based system in Java and javascript, with both jython and groovy used for testing.

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 that a JSON codec should be added to the standard library. At the time, there were multiple competing implementations of JSON codecs for python .

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 that all python|jython|ironpython JSON codecs could implement, and John Millikin tried to start such an effort .

But Guido, the python BDFL disagreed, and blessed what was at that time the most popular python JSON codec, simplejson, written by Bob Ippolito . Bob contributed simplejson to the python standard library, and it became the json module in cpython 2.6

Future¶

My intention for Jyson is to

1. Modify it so that it complies fully with the API of the cpython json module
2. Contribute it to the jython project so that jython has a fast pure-java implementation of the json module.