XML days are numbered…. it’s just my opinion. I know, it’s out there in the wild, almost everywhere. But XML itself has a huge overhead, which is something we, as mobile software developers, really want to avoid.
Personally, i just love json. It’s extremely lightweight… and i dare to say, it is what XML should have been. Why is it exactly that you need to repeat a keyword once and over and over…???. I still don’t get what those guys were thinking… when they wrote the XML specs.
Allright. Enough with bashing outdated standards!. How do we parse / serialize JSON ?. Apple itself has a parser / serializer. But there are faster alternatives.
NXJson was written by a friend of mine. Although it’s not the fastest parser out there, it’s pretty amazing. Go get it, it’s under MIT license, so you’re free to use it anywhere. And good news… it also works on Mac!
The second alternative is JSONKit. That is indeed the fastest parser in the market. Which one to get?. Both are free… just download them both, and study their source code. That’s the coolest thing about open source. Your skills can increas substantially just by reading other’s work.
And at some point… we should return something to the community…!!.