GWT overlay types, converting to JSON

Question

In GWT, what is the best way to convert a JavaScriptObject overlay type into a JSON string?

I currently have

public final String toJSON() {      
    return new JSONObject(this).toString();
}

Which seems to work fine. I would like to know if there are any better approaches.

Answer 1

I've never actually tried that (only consumed JSON so far, never needed to produce it). This seems to be native browser/javascript functionality.

You could write it as:

public native String toJSON() /*-{
  return this.toString();
}-*/;

They essentially just do the exact same thing and likely result in identical JavaScript output. The optimizing compiler is really amazing.

Answer 2

we have a JSNI method like that, but use douglas crockfords JSON library (in case the browser doesn't supply one natively):

https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js

public native String stringify() /*-{
  return JSON.stringify();
}-*/;

whats nice is that stringify can take parameters to pretty-print the output with a specified indentation... among other things