JSYNC is brilliant!
It's a brilliant idea: bank on JSON's popularity and more widespread implementations, add some of the important YAML features not present in JSON on top of it. The result is JSYNC, along with its preliminary CPAN module. (I'd probably picked a different name and choose something like "\" for prefix instead of ".", but hey, it's not my project :-)
A few months ago I was really desperate with the YAML situation in Perl. We have the largest number of YAML implementations, but none of them are good enough compared to Ruby's libsyck. I even contemplated converting all my YAML documents to JSON, but of course that plan was cancelled because JSON doesn't even support references nor objects.
Here's to hoping JSYNC will rocket to popularity soon enough. Ingy++.
A programmer (mostly Perl 5 nowadays).
My CPAN ID: SHARYANTO. I'm sedusedan on perlmonks. My twitter is stevenharyanto (but I don't tweet much). Follow me on github: sharyanto.
I'm still a little bummed that YAML never took off in popularity. It is just so darn pretty!
Yeesh. Next up, let's figure out how to coerce a PDF into an Excel spreadsheet by making each cell one pixel.
You know that we have libsyck and it's not good enough either, right?
@Stuart: I would say YAML is popular "enough" (YMMV) in Perl/Ruby/Python circles (e.g. just look at CPAN META files, they're all YAML files). But it's hard to beat JSON when you do PHP/JavaScript because it's readily available when YAML is not.
True, YAML documents are so pretty!
@Mike: nice try :) I would've probably drawn an analogy between RTF (JSYNC) being on top of text files (JSON) trying to emulate DOC (YAML). Sarcasms aside, JSYNC just adds a few syntactic markup over normal JSON, it's really a nice hack.
@hdp: Do you mean YAML::Syck? Yes, it lacks some features that Ruby's YAML have, despite both being based on libsyck. Consult the bug reports for YAML::Syck in CPAN's RT.