> So what am I suggesting? I’m suggesting letting JSON serialization be about JSON only. Let JSON serializer libraries handle translating between text and a representation of the JSON object model. They can do that one job really well, quickly and robustly. Once you have that, you take over! You take direct control over the mapping from JSON to your own model.
I’m mainly immersed in the Scala world so I’m not sure what solutions in other languages look like, but this is essentially what Circe[0] does, and very well IMO. You write Encoders/Decoders for your domain model which serialize your data to the JSON object model and the library takes care of serializing that to text. In most simple cases you can probably just use the (semi)auto-derived Encoder/Decoders so you don’t need to actually write them, but that’s besides the point which is that Circe does have this separation of concerns and makes working with JSON mostly painless (at least for me).
I’m mainly immersed in the Scala world so I’m not sure what solutions in other languages look like, but this is essentially what Circe[0] does, and very well IMO. You write Encoders/Decoders for your domain model which serialize your data to the JSON object model and the library takes care of serializing that to text. In most simple cases you can probably just use the (semi)auto-derived Encoder/Decoders so you don’t need to actually write them, but that’s besides the point which is that Circe does have this separation of concerns and makes working with JSON mostly painless (at least for me).
[0] https://circe.github.io/circe/