Month: August 2010

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Code Quality

Morten, it’s actually my fault.

the patch that was submitted was the incorrect one; I’ve been fixing the implementation since then, mostly because the API is correct — and went through different eyeballs to ensure that — and we wanted to land it before the GLib freeze. the implementation, alas, has issues — and not just the ones you saw.

as I said, it’s definitely my fault: I reviewed the original in a way that was less than acceptable. I sincerely apologize for that.

okay, having said that, and resuming my usual self: bitching on planet GNOME is not going to get anything fixed. insulting the maintainer when the issue lies mostly in a “patch lieutenant” (such as myself) is also not how polite people deal with errors.

finally, saying that the code needs to be taken out back is a lame cop-out and it is an untenable position for anyone contributing. the code went in, there were issues, so it needs to be fixed. if we waited for perfect code the amount of merged we’d get would be zero. that code has been in the bug for the past 6 months, and it’s been discussed in the past IRC meetings, with public minutes and logs.

so, please: file bugs. I’ll try to close them faster than you can open them.

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Walk the line

I’ve noticed that I haven’t blogged about JSON-GLib in a while.

since the last time, I release version 0.10, which had a lot of fixes in the JSON ⬌ GObject transformation code, thanks to the contributions of Tristan Van Berkom. the 0.10 release allowed to transform all GObject properties of fundamental types — and to register transformation functions for boxed types as well. it also had bugs fixes coming from Clutter and other projects using JSON-GLib.

now we’re near the 0.12 release — I released the first release candidate on August 2nd, and I plan to do another release candidate along with the GNOME 2.31.90 snapshot.

for this cycle I’ve had the contribution of Luca Bruno, who wrote a JsonBuilder class which provides a simple API for building JSON trees. JsonBuilder has been inspired by JSONWriter and by GVariantBuilder:

JsonBuilder *builder = json_builder_new ();

json_builder_begin_object (builder);

json_builder_set_member_name (builder, "url");
json_builder_add_string_value (builder, "http://www.gnome.org/img/flash/two-thirty.png");

json_builder_set_member_name (builder, "size");
json_builder_begin_array (builder);
json_builder_add_int_value (builder, 652);
json_builder_add_int_value (builder, 242);
json_builder_end_array (builder);

json_builder_end_object (builder);

JsonGenerator *gen = json_generator_new ();
json_generator_set_root (json_builder_get_root (builder));
char *str = json_generator_to_data (generator);

g_object_unref (generator);
g_object_unref (builder);

/* "str" now contains the string:
 * { "url" : "http://www.gnome.org/img/flash/two-thirty.png", "size" : [ 652, 242 ] }
 */

in the same spirit, I had a fun two hours hacking session that resulted in an XmlReader-like API for JSON trees, called JsonReader:

/* str contains the JSON from the example above */
JsonParser *parser = json_parser_new ();
json_parser_load_from_data (parser, str, -1, NULL);

JsonReader *reader = json_reader_new (json_parser_get_root (parser));

json_reader_read_member (reader, "url");
const char *url = json_reader_get_string_value (reader);
json_reader_end_member (reader);

json_reader_read_member (reader, "size");

json_reader_read_element (reader, 0);
int width = json_reader_get_int_value (reader);
json_reader_end_element (reader);

json_reader_read_element (reader, 1);
int height = json_reader_get_int_value (reader);
json_reader_end_element (reader);

json_reader_end_member (reader);

g_object_unref (reader);
g_object_unref (parser);

I also added support for parsing (synchronously and asynchronously) JSON from a GInputStream and generating stringified JSON to a GOutputStream (in this case, only synchronously). this means that JSON-GLib now depends on GIO.

for the next cycle, which is going to be fairly relaxed in terms of duration, I’m planning some new features like support for the JSON Schema draft in the JsonParser class; and a sensible implementation of a Path API for direct access of members.

if you have bug reports, feature requests, or code you want to contribute, feel free to hop in Bugzilla and file a new ticket.

have fun!