Weekend Hack: JSON vs CONF

It was time. I had been putting it off for far too long – learning about JSON and deciding on a new .conf file format for Inadyn. So this weekend I sat myself down to read up on JSON and the multitude of parser libraries for both JSON and traditional .conf file parsers. I was looking for a human readable file format that a user could easily and reliably edit by themselves without it being too error prone or sensitive to mistyping.

I quickly narrowed down my scope of investigation to Jansson for JSON and and Confuse for “standard” UNIX .conf files. Both have very liberal licenses, extensive test suites, very good documentation and are extremely well written! In fact, I will probably use them as prime examples of well maintained Open Source projects in the future :-)

The resulting code is in my toolbox on GitHub.

In my opinion the .conf file is a lot easier to read, write and edit by Joe User, so that’s what I’ll be using for many of my own projects, starting with Inadyn