json-n-xml

Never be faced to choosing between JSON or XML... just use what comes at hand and json-n-xml (a bidirectionnal JSON<->XML SAX-based mapper). You'll find on on this blog a short explanation of why this library was created and an example of where it can come in handy: http://www.habegger.fr/dont-choose-bewteen-json-or-xml/.

Example

Take this JSON document

{
    "name": "json-n-xml",
    "description": "A cool JSON to XML and back library",
    "features": [
        "Transform a json stream into an xjson XML stream",
        "Transform an xjson stream back to JSON"
    ],
    "authors": [
       {
          "firstname": "Benjamin",
          "lastname": "Habegger",
          "github": "bhabegger",
          "twitter": "@bhabegger"
       }
    ]
}

json-n-xml transforms it to the following xjson:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<object xmlns="http://www.objectml.org/ns/data/xjson">
  <value name="name">json-n-xml</value>
  <value name="description">A cool JSON to XML and back library</value>
  <array name="features">
     <value>Transform a json stream into an xjson XML stream</value>
     <value>Transform an xjson stream back to JSON</value>
  </array>
  <array name="authors">
     <object>
        <value name="firstname">Benjamin</value>
        <value name="lastname">Habegger</value>
        <value name="github">bhabegger</value>
        <value name="twitter">@bhabegger</value>
     </object>
  </array>
</object>

And now you can you those tons of tools around XML, like XPath and XSLT, to process your data.

For example, using the previous documents (with the j prefix mapped to 'http://www.objectml.org/ns/data/xjson'):

• Get the "features" using the XPath expression

    //j:object/j:array[@name='features']
  

• Get the "firstname"s of the "authors" using the XPath expression

    //j:object/j:array[@name='authors']/j:object/j:value[@name='firstname']
  

Isn't that awesome ? You now can do XPath on JSON data !!