Handling JSON

In Chapter 2, Data Acquisition we learned that certain YouTube searches return JSON formatted results. Specifically, the SearchResult class holds information relating to a specific search. In that section we illustrate how to use YouTube specific techniques to extract information. In this section we will illustrate how to extract JSON information using the Jackson JSON implementation.

JSON supports three models for processing data:

• Streaming API - JSON data is processed token by token
• Tree model - The JSON data is held entirely in memory and then processed
• Data binding - The JSON data is transformed to a Java object