JEP 540: Simple JSON API (Now in Incubator)

Summary

Summary Define a simple, standard API for parsing and generating JSON documents so that doing so does not require an external library. Enable many JSON processing tasks to be accomplished with little coding. This is an incubating API. History This JEP supersedes JEP 198, Light-Weight JSON API, which was written in 2014. Circumstances have changed in the intervening years, so here we take a different approach. Goals Provide a standard means in the Java Platform to process RFC 8259 compliant JSON documents with low ceremony. Keep the API small, simple, and easy to learn. Provide only those data types and operations required for strict conformance to RFC 8259, in order to facilitate machine-to-machine communication. Avoid features such as multiple parsing configurations, syntax extensions, data binding, and streaming. Ensure that code that navigates and extracts data from JSON documents with a known structure is simple and readable. Because JSON documents do not have schemas, such code serves as a de facto schema and should be readable as such. Enable easy and quick exploration of unfamiliar JSON documents. We often interact with JSON documents in an exploratory manner, writing code not using a specification but instead trying it out against example documents. The API should provide methods that fail fast with clear error messages, enabling quick exploration. Ensure that missing or unexpected values can be handled in a resilient fashion, since JSON document structures can evolve over time. Make the JDK itself capable of parsing and generating JSON documents. Non-Goals It is not a goal to create an API that supplants established external JSON libraries. Motivation JSON is ubiquitous in modern computing. The Java ecosystem contains a wide range of established JSON libraries: Jackson, Gson, Jakarta JSON Processing and Binding, Fastjson 2, and more. Not only do these libraries enable the parsing and generation of JSON documents, but they also support extended JSON syntaxes...