Replace JSONKit with NSJSONSerialization

[jdzak]

JSON serialization/de-serialization was added to the native iOS libraries back in iOS 5.0 via NSJSONSerialization.

Can we replace JSONKit with NSJSONSerialization?

[yoon]

We could if we don't mind giving up the performance boost. JSONKit also happens to be very lightweight. Are there any other motivations to remove it?

[jdzak]

The motivation was general code cleaning. I thought if there is a way to serialize/deserialize JSON using iOS native classes, we could migrate to use that instead of relying on a third-party library.

On the performance boost, I'll do some benchmarks on an iPad with a couple surveys from the NUBIC NCS project and compare JSONKit versus NSJSONSerialization. In the JSONKit performance tests, he says he ran these on a MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz Core 2 with iOS 5.1 (I'm assuming), so there may have been optimizations done for the iPad or updates with iOS 6.0 since then. Also, it's worth mentioning that these de-serializations only happen once when survey is initially loaded, for what it's worth.

[hfossli]

Did you get any results you care to share? :)

[pkyeck]

results would be interesting. 👍