Jason: Scriptable iOS JSON Client | Hacker News Reader

Jason: Scriptable iOS JSON Client

jasonclient.org

45 pointstga19 comments

Hi I'm the creator of Jason, I was going to wait a bit before I feel ready enough for Show HN but I guess someone already posted :)

Jason came out of my personal frustration with building apps. I think it takes too much time and effort going from an idea to an actual functional app, even if you're an experienced developer.

I really think you should be able to just whip up some script and have it running in 5 minutes, as quick and easy as writing a blog post.

As an example here are two hacker news clients I just wrote up in 2 minutes:

ShowHN app: http://www.jasonclient.org/gallery/show/index.html?id=http:/...

HN firehose client: http://www.jasonclient.org/gallery/show/index.html?id=http:/...

Jason is completely native. It's not one of those html5 hybrid app builders. The JSON script you write is used to directly manipulate these native elements and also can even invoke native device functions such as camera, geolocation, audio/video playback, etc.

Please ask any questions, I'm here.

> I was going to wait a bit before I feel ready enough for Show HN

Go ahead and post it as a Show HN when you're ready. We won't treat it as a duplicate.

Thank you, I will!

In a past project, we had a similar system used where most of the UI of the iOS app was driven by json served by the server. You can definitely do a lot, but the syntax of json had quite some limitation especially when you are trying to code some complex UI actions or add some business logic linked to your dynamic UI.

The system did evolve into using a combination of json and JS using for back then the newly introduced framework JavaScriptCore ... It made everything a lot easier overall since JS is definitely a proper language.

The JS obviously was able to map to native objects and thus performance overall was great. The app is still used by millions of users daily.

Edit: typo and adding more info

I've faced lots of challenges in terms of expressive power while working on Jason, but think I've figured out a lot of them. Could you share some of the challenges you faced? It would help a lot. Thanks!

Looks really cool, thanks for this! If there is one thing holding me back, it's that JSON is a bit of a pain to write manually. Do you have any plans to support a more human-friendly format like YAML[1] or Hjson[2]? I guess I can always manually convert those to JSON, but it'd be neat to not have to.

[1] http://www.yaml.org

[2] http://hjson.org

I'm a huge fan of hjson. I agree it's pain in the ass to write JSON, especially the need to double quote everything. My goal was to release this asap and get actual feedback and work on things people want first.

To answer your question more specifically, as long as you can turn a data into JSON format you can run it on Jason. That's what I do in this tutorial where you can turn any spreadsheet data into JSON and then run it on Jason. http://www.jasonclient.org/spreadsheet/

Also there's an HTML parser which turns HTML into JSON format and then renders it in Jason (http://www.jasonclient.org/gallery/show/index.html?id=http:/...)

So I'm sure I can add on HJSON and YAML support. BTW please join the slack channel if you're interested, http://textethan.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=54e23b3fe61... I'm happy to chat :)

That's brilliant, thanks for the reply!

Good call on getting something out the door quickly and waiting for feedback. Not sure you need to support both YAML and Hjson, just one human-friendly format would be enough, especially as the conversion is easy enough to automate.

Just tested, it's awesome. It's really fast I like it! :). It would be nice to have an Android version of this as well.

Hi, the creator here, If you look at how layout is implemented, it's very similar to android linear layout and its intentional. I do have plans for android version :)

Interesting but is this HTML+JS reinvented?

Yes, to be precise it's HTML+JS+CSS reinvented. I took lots of inspiration from existing browser standards while developing Jason.

But to be clear, it's NOT one of those html5 hybrid app builders. Jason is a scripting language that you use to manipulate native functions and elements directly. There is no HTML and packaging going on.

Also on the packaging note, the whole point of Jason is you can just write something up quickly and have a functional app running in 5 minutes. No compile, no build, no upload/download, no deployment. All you need is a single flat JSON file and you can share that url with anyone.

Does this make sense?

Can you do a multi-page on this? Like having one link to another page and parsing another jason?

Yup. Here's a demo http://www.jasonclient.org/gallery/show/index.html?id=http:/... Scroll down to the bottom and tap the orange rounded button. And here's a documentation for that http://www.jasonclient.org/doc/#1-href

Lastly, please join the slack channel if you're interested http://textethan.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=54e23b3fe61... , I'm always there :)

Looks really neat! Thanks for putting this out there!

Any chance the code for this will be open-sourced?

My top priority is to make this as extensible as possible, open sourcing is one option I'm considering but it comes with lots of challenges including security issues. I'm still exploring different options, would love to chat, please join the slack channel if you're interested :) http://textethan.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=54e23b3fe61...

Such a clever idea. Take raw JSON content and turn it into an app.

Very, very well done... Thank you for creating this.

Great idea and very interesting stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com