JSON: A New Kid on the Block

With Web Edition coming along and more and more feature requests coming in, one of the essentials to making external services work was to add JSON support (http://www.json.org). This nifty protocol written by Douglas Crockford is a way to represent objects as a string so they can be transmitted across the internet. As it turned out, interfacing with Google's Geocoding engine was the perfect opportunity to add JSON to the upcoming Real Studio 2011 Release 2.

Building on an open-source library from Charcoal Design, we created a new class named JSONItem. For those of you that don't already know, JSON objects can either contain named items (like a dictionary) or indexed items (like an array). To make these objects a little easier to create, we've added methods so you can manipulate them either way. Values can be Strings, Numbers, Booleans, Nil or another JSONItem.

For instance:

//Like a Dictionary

Dim Person as new JSONItem

Person.Value("Name") = "John Doe"

Person.Value("Married") = True

Person.Value("Age") = 35

Person.Value("Spouse") = "Jane Doe"

//Like an array

Dim Kids as new JSONItem

Kids.Append "James"

Kids.Append "Julie"

Kids.Append "Joe"

Kids.Append "Jessica"

//Add the Kids JSONItem to the parent JSONItem

Person.Value("Kids") = Kids

//Create a JSON string from the defined object

Dim JSONString as String = Person.ToString()

JSONString = {"Name":"John Doe","Married":true,"Age":35,"Spouse":"Jane Doe","Kids":["James","Julie","Joe","Jessica"]}

In addition to creating JSON Strings, JSONItem can parse them. Once loaded, you can walk through the object as if you were traversing a folderitem tree. Using the example above:

Person = new JSONItem(JSONString) //From the example above

Dim MyKids as JSONItem = Person.Child("Kids")

For i As Integer = 0 to MyKids.Count-1

MsgBox MyKids.Value(i)

Next i

Services that you can communicate with using JSON include Google, WordPress, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.