Poor, neglected blog. Normal life as an Indianapolis software developer just isn’t as exciting to write or read about as three-legged dog-riding monkeys in Belize. Be that as it may, I do have a little something to share with the world today…and hopefully we’ll have more entertaining travel stories in the near future.
Geek Post Warning – those of you who are here for entertainment and are not particularly fond of the geeky software talk might want to skip the rest of this post.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of side development with Google App Engine for Java and the Restlet 2.0 framework as a backend server for a couple of different iPhone projects lately — Google App Engine is badass technology suite for web developers, but more on that some other time. JSON is a pretty important data interchange format for iPhone development, so I tried out a whole bunch of Java-to-JSON and JSON-to-Java serialization/deserialization open source libraries. There are plenty of options and lots of strengths and weaknesses to compare and contrast, but I eventually settled back on the first JSON serialization framework I learned, the JsonPlugin for Struts 2. One problem…I’m doing Restlet work now, not Struts 2. It turned out to be not too difficult to remove the Struts dependencies from the JsonPlugin code, however, and I’ve decided to release my changes back to the open source community under the Google Code project named “json-libre” – it’s the Struts2 Json Plugin code, freed from its dependence on Struts. Head nod to Garrett for helping me come up with a name.
Check it out here: http://code.google.com/p/json-libre/
I’m not crazy about forking projects, so I wrote the Struts Development team to see if they’d be interested in somehow making this part of the normal codebase. If I hear back from them and they’re interested, there’s a chance that this project might get deprecated and moved back into their codebase. For now it’s out there and free for your use.
