For some time now I (badly) wanted to be able to work with JSON structures in Scala just as easily as in JavaScript (though even in JS you need some wizardry to be able to to this elegantly).
I don’t particularly like Json4s since I feel that it’s overly complex (no, I don’t want to extract data into case classes using for-combinators), documentation is difficult to grasp and use (especially for edge cases) and Jackson and various other libraries are mainly oriented towards the Java-style JSON handling which basically means mapping to/from POJOs or similar.
What I wanted was to be able to navigate and/or alter a JSON structure directly using simple dot/call notations (e.g. json.server.hosts(2).name = "storage.mysite.com") and have a cheat-sheet-like documentation which whould (always) be simple and sufficient.
So here is my first swing at this using pure Scala parser combinators and other Scala-specific magic like Dynamics. The only dependencies (beside the Scala library) are the Scala parser combinators and Apache commons lang (I need this for string-escaping, especially Unicode stuff). License is Apache 2.0.
Disclaimer: This library is a first serious attempt at this problem and thus it is not optimized for high parsing speed, or low memory footprint; it does, however, deliver on ease of working with the JSON structure, which is the main goal. A second release is in the works which tries to optimize for better parsing speed and lower memory consumption.
Furthermore, I had no time yet to write a complete reference (i.e. the mentioned cheat-sheet), however the 120+ unit tests should be enough to get you going for now.
Check-out the sources here!
Compiling
Normally you would just copy the com/vpalos/Json.scala file inside your source tree and ensure you bring the dependencies in your project (i.e. see build.gradle), but if you want to build a Jar or run the tests just do this (you should be connected to the Internet for all tests to pass):
git clone "https://github.com/vpalos/com.vpalos.Json.git"
cd "com.vpalos.Json"
./gradlew test
# ...or...
./gradlew build
Teaser
Please visit the unit tests for a more complete overview! However, here are thre one-liners that should make you interested:
"""{"fox": {"quick": true, "purple": false}}""".toJson.fox.quick.asBoolean // true
"""{"points": [12.3, 991.8, 4.009, 1]}""".toJson.points(-2) // 4.009
Json.parse("{}").some.missing.field.isDefined // false, no exceptions thrown
Enjoy!