YAJL C Bindings for Ruby (work in progress)

This gem (although not in gem form just yet) is a C binding to the excellent YAJL JSON parsing library.

You can read more info at the projects website lloydforge.org/projects/yajl or check out it’s codes at github.com/lloyd/yajl.

Example of use

First, you’re probably gonna want to include it:

 include 'yajl'

Then maybe parse some JSON from:

a File IO

 json_contents = File.new('test.json', 'r')
 hash = Yajl::Native.parse(json)

or maybe a StringIO

 json_contents = StringIO.new
 hash = Yajl::Native.parse(json)

or maybe STDIN

 cat someJsonFile.json | ruby -ryajl -e "puts Yajl::Native.parse(STDIN).inspect"

There are a lot more possibilities, some of which I’m going to write other gems/plugins for.

Some ideas are parsing logs in JSON format, an ActiveSupport patch, Rack middleware, use with ohai, JSON API clients, etc…

How to install

First, Yajl uses CMake to build itself (yes, the author realizes this isn’t the norm for open source and is willing and ready to accept patches, fork away kids!) so you’ll need to grab it first from www.cmake.org.

After you’ve got that, grab the latest version of Yajl itself from the Githubs at github.com/lloyd/yajl.

After you have that installed, you should be able to install it like any other gem hosted here like so:

(more instructions here: gems.github.com)

 sudo gem install brianmario-yajl-ruby

Benchmarks

I’ll update this readme with some actual data soon.

After I finished implementation - this library performs close to the same as the current JSON.parse (C gem) does on small/medium files.

But on larger files, and higher amounts of iteration, this library was around 2x faster than JSON.parse.

The main benefit of this library is in it’s memory usage.

Since it’s able to parse the stream in chunks, it’s memory requirements are very, very low.

Again, I’ll post some actual data on this; but in my testing here’s what my ruby executable was using to parse a 10MB JSON file 100 times:

 JSON.parse ~60MB
 Yajl::Native.parse ~30MB

Status

This library is still being refined and should by no means be used in production. That being said, I’d like to invite you to clone/fork and test the crap out of it! ;)

TODO

While parsing is working for the most part, there are still some edge cases I need to tackle. Here’s a list of things I need to get done to improve the awesomeness of this library.

• Write up a test suite
• Fix known parsing issues with certain JSON strings (Yajl itself works fine, it’s the logic in this library that needs a little tweaking)
• Write more docs