JSON Serialiser and Deserialiser in Rust

JSOxideN is a JSON serialiser and deserialiser written in Rust, created as a personal learning exercise to deepen my understanding of traits, macros, and procedural macros. The project leverages the syn and proc_macro crates to handle the serialisation and deserialisation of any Rust struct with named fields to and from JSON data.

Educational Outcomes

• Traits: Implemented derivable traits using procedural macros for JSON serialisation and deserialisation. Ensuring that implementations work within Rust's orphan rules.
• Procedural macros with syn and proc_macro crates: Used the syn crate for parsing Rust code and the proc_macro crate for creating procedural macros leveraging the syntax trees generated by syn to automatically derive serialisation and deserilisation implementations.
• Macro usage: Utilized Rust macros to reduce boilerplate by generating code.
• Automatic test generation: Used build.rs to automatically generate tests based on the files provided by the JSONTestSuite.

Usage

The library can be used with the inbuilt Value type that represents the types specified by JSON. A variety of helpful methods are provided for manipulating and accessing the Value type and a keys of a JSON object can be accessed using the standard index operator.

For easier usage the library also allows strong typing through structs, allowing the user to define a struct and automatically derive a deserialisation implementation.

Any struct with compatible named fields can also derive a serialisation implementation to convert an instance to a JSON string.

Deserialisation and serialisation implementations are already provided for all signed and unsigned integers (excluding usize and isize), the floating point types, characters, strings, and vectors. Option<T> is also supported and objects are represented with IndexMap.

IndexMap allows JSON objects to be stored and then output in the order they were consumed either from a JSON string or from a struct.

Example

The provided derive macro can be used to implement deserialisation for structs:

use jsoxiden::Deserialise;

#[derive(Deserialise)]
struct MyStruct {
    field1: String,
    field2: i32,
}

let json_data = r#"
{
    "field1": "value",
    "field2": 42
}
"#;

let my_struct = MyStruct::from_str(json_data).unwrap();

Serialisation can then be used as follows:

use jsoxiden::{Deserialise, Serialise};

#[derive(Deserialise, Serialise)]
struct MyStruct {
    field1: String,
    field2: i32,
}

let json_data = r#"
{
    "field1": "value",
    "field2": 42
}
"#;

let my_struct = MyStruct::from_str(json_data).unwrap();
println!("{}", my_struct.to_json_string());

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

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This project represents a personal educational journey into areas of Rust I had not previously been exposed to, further pushing the boundaries of my knowledge and skills with the language.