Sending and Parsing JSON Objects in Android

I am surprised these have not been mentioned: but instead of using bare-bones rather manual process with json.org's little package, GSon and Jackson are much more convenient to use. So:

  • GSON
  • Jackson

So you can actually bind to your own POJOs, not some half-assed tree nodes or Lists and Maps. (and at least Jackson allows binding to such things too (perhaps GSON as well, not sure), JsonNode, Map, List, if you really want these instead of 'real' objects)

EDIT 19-MAR-2014:

Another new contender is Jackson jr library: it uses same fast Streaming parser/generator as Jackson (jackson-core), but data-binding part is tiny (50kB). Functionality is more limited (no annotations, just regular Java Beans), but performance-wise should be fast, and initialization (first-call) overhead very low as well. So it just might be good choice, especially for smaller apps.


You can use org.json.JSONObject and org.json.JSONTokener. you don't need any external libraries since these classes come with Android SDK


GSON is easiest to use and the way to go if the data have a definite structure.

Download gson.

Add it to the referenced libraries.

package com.tut.JSON;

import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.util.Log;

import com.google.gson.Gson;
import com.google.gson.GsonBuilder;

public class SimpleJson extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);

        String jString = "{\"username\": \"tom\", \"message\": \"roger that\"}  ";


        GsonBuilder gsonb = new GsonBuilder();
        Gson gson = gsonb.create();
        Post pst;

        try {
            pst = gson.fromJson(jString,  Post.class);

        } catch (JSONException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Code for Post class

package com.tut.JSON;

public class Post {

    String message;
    String time;
    String username;
    Bitmap icon;
}