[rest-practices] JSON style guidelines?

[Bill Burke]

+1 on using Jackson.  I'm not impressed with Jettison's stability and 
Jackson seems to have a lot more momentum behind it.

Jackson also I think supports JAXB annotations.

The Jettison approach + BadgerFish is only interesting, IMO, if you want 
to have an XML Schema that defines both your XML and JSON documents that 
represent the same information.

There's also JSON schema which I believe Jackson also supports.

For all, i think you should rely on the client to know what type to 
expect based on the URL they client *AND* the Content-Type returned. i.e.

application/customer+json

*+json isn't "standardized", but IMO, that *+type style should be well 
understood.

James Bowes wrote:
> Hi all:
> 
> For Candlepin, our primary media type is JSON. We've been using
> RESTEasy with Jettison, which does:
> JAXB annotated object -> XML -> JSON
> As such, we're really representing the XML mappings of our objects in
> JSON, rather than the objects themselves. Jettison is doing this with
> the BadgerFish mapping convention, so we get JSON like:
> {
>   "consumer" : {
>     "name" : "my consumer",
>     "facts" : {
>       "entry" : [
>         { "key" : "memory", "value" : 12345 },
>         { "key" : "memory.free", "value" : 60 }
>       ]
>     }
>   }
> }
> 
> My feeling is that if you're using JSON, you want it to be as compact as
> possible. To that end, I've been working on using Jackson instead, which
> cuts out the XML middleman, giving us JSON like:
> {
>   "name" : "my consumer",
>   "facts" : {
>     "memory" : 12345,
>     "memory.free" : 60
>   }
> }
> 
> The mapping of the "facts" hash is much nicer, but you do lose that
> beginning "consumer" type hint. I was thinking we could add a
> "type_hint" field inside the returned object instead, or just rely on
> the client to know what type to expect based on the url they hit.
> 
> What is the opinion of the list? Is anyone aware of any gotchas with the
> various JSON styles for autogenerating class representations?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -James
> 
> 
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-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com