LWP::JSON::Tiny - use JSON natively with LWP objects
This is version 0.009.
my $user_agent = LWP::UserAgent::JSON->new;
my $request = HTTP::Request::JSON->new(POST => "$url_prefix/upload_dance");
$request->json_content({ contents => [qw(badger mushroom snake)] });
my $response = $user_agent->request($request);
if (my $upload_id = $response->json_content->{upload}{id}) {
print "Uploaded Weebl rip-off: $upload_id\n";
}
my $other_response = $some_other_object->do_stuff(...);
if (LWP::UserAgent::JSON->rebless_maybe($other_response)) {
do_something($other_response->json_content);
}
A lot of RESTful API integration involves pointless busy work with setting accept and content-type headers, remembering how Unicode is supposed to work and so on. This is a very simple wrapper around HTTP::Request and HTTP::Response that handles all of that for you.
There are four classes in this distribution:
Pulls in the other classes, and implements a "json_object" method which returns a JSON object, suitable for parsing and emitting JSON.
A subclass of HTTP::Request. It automatically sets the Accept header to application/json, and implements a json_content method which takes a JSONable data structure and sets the content-type.
A subclass of HTTP::Response. It implements a json_content method which decodes the JSON contents into a Perl data structure.
A subclass of LWP::UserAgent. It does only one thing: is a response has content-type JSON, it reblesses it into a HTTP::Response::JSON object. It exposes this method rebless_maybe for convenience, if you ever get an HTTP::Response object back from some other class.
As befits a ::Tiny distribution, sensible defaults are applied. If you really need to tweak this stuff (e.g. you really care about the very slight performance impact of sorting all hash keys), look at the individual modules' documentation for how you can subclass behaviour.
Out: $json
Returns a JSON object, as per JSON::MaybeXS->new. Cached across multiple calls for speed.
Note that the JSON object has the utf8 option disabled. This is deliberate. The documentation for JSON::XS is very clear that the utf8 option means both that it should spit out JSON in UTF8, and that it should expect strings passed to it to be in UTF8 encoding. This latter part is daft, and violates the best practice that character encoding should be dealt with at the outermost layer.
Out: %default_json_arguments
The default arguments to pass to JSON::MaybeXS->new. This is what you'd subclass if you wanted to change how LWP::JSON::Tiny encoded JSON.
JSON::API handles authentication and common URL prefixes, but (a) doesn't support PATCH routes, and (b) makes you use a wrapper object rather than LWP directly.
WWW::JSON handles authentication (including favours of OAuth), common URL prefixes, response data structure transformations, but has the same limitations as JSON::API, as well as being potentially unwieldy.
LWP::Simple::REST decodes JSON but makes you use a wrapper object, and looks like a half-hearted attempt that never went anywhere.
Sam Kington <skington@cpan.org>
The source code for this module is hosted on GitHub https://github.com/skington/lwp-json-tiny - this is probably the best place to look for suggestions and feedback.
Copyright (c) 2015 Sam Kington.
This library is free software and may be distributed under the same terms as perl itself.