On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 10:46 PM, Branko Čibej <br...@wandisco.com> wrote: > Why? If I understand this change, the result will be a not very standard > stream of nul-terminated JSON objects. While the svnpubsub client will > parse that, other JSON-consuming tools will need extra work. > > Why not return a proper JSON array instead?
Indeed that is exactly how it was. The problem is that is a pain (thought not impossible) to write a client for JSON with the old format. When I started writing irkerbridge I was unaware there was a client and so I started just trying to use the JSON stream directly and I ran into the same issues these guys did: http://www.enricozini.org/2011/tips/python-stream-json/ Without thinking too much I started stripping the trailing ',' and feeding the results into json.loads(). Then I realized that it wouldn't work with a large log message that ends up going as being split up and you get multiple blocks delivered to the application. I used '\0' instead of '\n' as suggested on that page because a null is not valid in JSON unless escaped so you can trivially transform the whole thing into an array if you needed to. The other alternatives are to find a JSON parser for python that supports streaming (might be able to use the object_hook in the json module to do this). Or make the client code JSON aware and do something like counting brackets to figure out when you're ready to decode an object. I chose this method because it made it easier for everyone to write a client even if they chose some other language or toolset. As a group if we don't like that chose I'm happy to change it again.
