JSONwidget

jsonwidget

An automatic form generator/editor for JSON

News:

2010-04-21 - jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.7). Minor improvements to the API + new "Insert New Item" command.
2010-04-13 - jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.6). New version with integrated web server + javascript from jsonwidget-javascript.
2010-03-19 - jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.5). This version is the first packaged with a csv editor, a schema generator, and preliminary support for json-schema.org schemas
2010-03-13 - jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.4).
2010-03-09 - jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.3). This version is the is pacakged for Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid
2010-03-04 - Update of jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.2). This version is the first version uploaded to Pypi (well, technically the second; 0.1.1 was a botched release)
2010-02-25 - Initial release of jsonwidget-python (version 0.1.0). See my blog post explaining this in great detail
2010-02-24 - A new version of jsonwidget under development (jsonwidget-python), using Python instead of Javascript. I've created documentation for the schema format in anticipation of this. Additionally, the source repository for jsonwidget-javascript has been migrated to Bitbucket/Mercurial.
2005-12-01 - jsonwidget-javascript 0.1.0 release. Current version has only been tested with Firefox 1.0.7. Known to be very buggy in IE and Opera, if it works at all. (Heck, it's pretty buggy in Firefox, still). Future versions will have much more testing in other browsers.

The jsonwidget libraries

The jsonwidget libraries are a set of libraries for doing the following:

Implementing a form interface for editing arbitrary JSON files.
Validating JSON against a schema
Other utility functions

Implementations so far:

jsonwidget-python: A terminal window implementation suitable for editing forms via ssh or in a local terminal window.
jsonwidget-javascript: A client-side Javascript library generates a basic HTML form interface in the browser

Application designers using these libraries have the option of providing a schema, limiting the input to a subset of valid JSON compatible with whatever application is actually consuming the JSON, or using a provided permissive schema that allows any valid JSON. The libraries are capable of dynamically generating a form is dynamically generated using nothing more than a schema and a JSON file as input.

The libraries are licensed under a BSD-style license, making the licensing very flexible for many different applications.

jsonwidget-python

jsonwidget-python is a general-purpose JSON validation and manipulation library. The following applications are bundled with jsonwidget-python:

jsonedit - A terminal-based applications (like you would use via SSH or local terminal on Linux and Mac). It's based on urwid, an excellent Python-based library for building terminal-based user interfaces.
csvedit - A variation on jsonedit that allows editing of .csv/tsv files.
jwc - a command line utility with the following functions:
- editserver - launch a web server to edit a json file from a browser
- json2yaml - convert a json file to yaml with comments pulled from schema (also yaml2json to go back)
- schemagen - create a schema from an example json file
- validate - validate a JSON file against a schema

Links:

Introduction to jsonwidget-python
Download
- Tarball: jsonwidget-python 0.1.7
- PyPI command: easy_install jsonwidget
  (See also jsonwidget PyPI page and/or the PyPI tutorial)
- Ubuntu Karmic/Lucid package:
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:robla/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install jsonwidget
  (see the jsonwidget Launchpad page for details)
- bitbucket Mercurial repository: http://bitbucket.org/robla/jsonwidget-python/

jsonwidget-javascript

jsonwidget-javascript is a Javascript library that can be used to dynamically build client-side forms to edit arbitrarily complicated JSON structures. As of 2010-04-13, this is incorporated into jsonwidget-python.

Demos

Note: these demos don't work well in IE, but seem fine in Firefox, Chrome and presumably Safari: (as of this writing on 2010-04-13):

Address book - Simple address book entry form. See also the view with schema editing enabled.
Election Configuration Editor - this was the original application I wrote this for (to be integrated into Electowidget). It allows for flexible editing of a rather complex configuration file. See also the view with schema editing enabled.
Freeform JSON editor - any valid JSON file (sans comments) can be modified
Create schema by example - a freeform JSON editor with the ability to generate a schema from the source

Other demos are available via selection box at the bottom of the examples above.

Acknowledgements

This assembles a lot of code and ideas from other sources.

json.js - a modified, outdated version of Douglas Crockford's library, which allows for nicely formated JSON. My apologies to Mr. Crockford for the butchered, forked version.
Schema language inspired by and mostly compatible with the JSON version of Kwalify by Makoto Kuwata.
JSON.php by Michal Migurski and others. This is provided as originally distributed.
I'm certain there are others.

Mailing list

For help on using either of these, send mail to the jsonwidget@lists.robla.net mailing list. I don't anticipate much (any?) traffic here, but posting there is one way of getting my attention. Or just contact me directly at robla@robla.net.