Introduction

One of the biggest strengths of XML is XPath, the query-oriented language to query subsections of an XML document. Stefan Goessner proposed the JSONPath query language, a language with features similar to XPath that lets you extract just the bits of a JSON document your application needs.

Note that something's still doing the parsing: you don't get something for nothing, and JSONPath implementations require JSON parsing with at least similar memory and runtime characteristics. However, if there's a JSONPath library for the platform you're developing, JSONPath can lead to more readable code, as you don't need to mock entire classes only to extract a field or two or summarize a field across a collection of JSON values.

If you're used to developing for Microsoft platforms, you're certainly aware of Microsoft's Language Independent Query (LINQ) language that lets you use write declarative queries on enumerable data structures. While the .NET implementations of JSON parsing provide...