Introduction

As we discussed in previous chapters, JSON is an excellent medium to communicate with web services and clients, whether the clients are web applications or traditional applications. This is especially true for mobile applications, many of which run over lower-bandwidth wide area networks, where JSON's brevity in comparison with XML makes overall data payloads smaller, and thereby ensuring faster response time for remote queries.

Today's leading mobile platforms are Android and iOS. Android, running a variant of Linux, supports software development in Java and includes a JSON processor in the org.json namespace. iOS, loosely derived from Mach and BSD, supports software development using Objective-C, Swift, C, and C++, although for most application development, you use Objective-C or Swift, each of which contains a binding to the NSJSONSerialization class, which implements JSON parsing and JSON serialization.

An additional option for mobile developers is to use a cross...