Why YAJL?

2020/02/07
I (ex legacy coder) can now in five minutes create a provider GET REST API for a master file/table.

YAJL an Open Source JSON Tool (YAJL = Yet Another JSON Library)

• Open Source
• Ported to IBM i (ILE C) by Scott Klement & David Russo
• Scott has provided an RPG layer to simplify its usage also added direct RPG interfaces (YAJLR4)
• These simplify calling YAJL
•  You can download the whole package at www.scottklement.com/yajl/
• Generating JSON with RPG
• For both reading and writing JSON
• Originally created by Mozilla's Lloyd Hilaiel, He now works at Facebook
• Written in C and very, very fast
• Handles the UTF-8/EBCDIC translation for you

Notes
Scott Klement's port of YAJL is a great tool both for creation and consumption of JSON.
You can download the latest version of YAJL free of charge from Scott's site (www.scottklement.com/yajl/) and the install process is very simple and well documented. Did I mention that YAJL is very fast? Blazingly fast!
And of course Scott has done his usual stellar job of "RPGizing" the API calls to make it easy to use. For example, his RPG interfaces automatically take care of translating between EBCDIC and UTF-8.

2020-01-23
from http://www.scottklement.com/presentations/Options%20for%20Consuming%20REST%20APIs%20from%20RPG.pdf

HTTPAPI / YAJL 

• Easy to use
• Full-featured, offers capabilities that none of the others do
• Performs very well
• Requires you to download/install 3rdparty software

Db2 SQL Functions in SYSTOOLS

• Easy to use
• Has most needed features; missing multipart; missing error details
• Performs slowly, uses a lot of resources (due to Java JVMs)
• Included with OS, nothing to install

AXIS C Transport API 

• More difficult to use; pointer techniques; more code to do the same things
• Only does HTTP, none of the additional needed features
• Performs very well
• Included with OS, nothing to install