In my previous post, I mentioned I’ve started writing some scripts in Groovy. All was well until I wanted to persist data between tasks using JSON. The plan is to have a cron job that extracts data from a source and encodes it in a JSON file. I’ll then have a Project Zero application providing a service which when invoked would load the JSON data and return a summary of the data.

The good news… Project Zero has excellent built in JSON support through the zero.json.Json.decode and zero.json.Json.encode methods – which are amazing powerful and simple.

The bad news… When it comes to command line Groovy from groovy.codehaus.org, there doesn’t appear to be any built in support – bah!

So, using Groovy’s ability to use work with standard Java classes I trawled around for a Java JSON implementation. There’s a bunch listed on the www.json.org page, but having looked at a few none of them appear to be as simple as the Project Zero version.

The one that stood out was json-lib.sourceforge.net, but the number of dependencies it has on jars that have to be downloaded from external projects is mind boggling.

I tried importing the Project Zero jar files into my project to see if I could use the libraries they supply. But I soon discovered that it relies heavily on a running Project Zero environment. So no luck there either.

Surely it can’t be this difficult to have some simple JSON utility functions in Groovy. Right now I’m contemplating writing my own.