JSON Serialization in Vst/Flash

There are two new methods added to class “Object”:

• toJson – encodes the object as a JSON string
• toJson64 – encodes the object as a JSON BASE64 string

And two corresponding new methods in the class “String”:

• fromJson – converts a JSON string back to an object
• fromJson64 – converts a JSON BASE64 string back to an object

 As an example in Smalltalk:

#(1 2 3 'this' 'is' 'a' 'json' 'test' 4 5 6 7) toJson64

produces the string

'WzEsMiwzLCJ0aGlzIiwiaXMiLCJhIiwianNvbiIsInRlc3QiLDQsNSw2LDdd'

and

'WzEsMiwzLCJ0aGlzIiwiaXMiLCJhIiwianNvbiIsInRlc3QiLDQsNSw2LDdd' fromJson64

produces the original object

#(1 2 3 'this' 'is' 'a' 'json' 'test' 4 5 6 7)

These serialization methods have been added in preparation for:

• exchanging objects between a Vst/Flash session and server programs (eg PHP)
• exchanging objects between Vst/Flash sessions through P2P (eg Jabber/XMPP)

Hopefully, the beta for the XIFF IM project will soon be available.

If XIFF works as I expect, Vst/Flash should be able to exchange objects in real time between browser or Apollo sessions through any public Jabber server (and probably Google Talk as well).