Remove category methods

[stig]

No description provided.

[bvanderveen]

Why? I enjoyed these. :/

[stig]

There's primarily two reasons:

1. Support. Failing to specify the (frankly, magic) flags to get categories working on iOS is the biggest issue people have with the library. (Except perhaps imagined memory leaks, from people steadfastly compiling SBJson without ARC support.) See here
2. Support, again. When the category methods return nil, there's no obvious way to get at the error. In 3.x the methods NSLog the error, but it's not ideal. I don't want to throw exceptions either.

Saying that, the methods were deprecated in 3.2 - they will only be deleted in the 4.0 release. I do not intentionally break backwards compatibility in minor version releases! :-)

TBH, iOS 5 was released 15 months ago. I wouldn't expect anyone to use SBJson for new apps now if NSJSONSerialisation covers their need. If you go to the bother of installing a third-party JSON library for the benefit of calling a convenient category method I'd say you were crazy. And streaming support can't / won't be done via category methods.

If you're adding JSON support to an iOS 4 app at this point, I'd say you have bigger problems than having to call [[SBJsonParser new] objectWithString:foo] which is all the category methods really gave you.

[bvanderveen]

Wow! I didn't realize NSJSONSerialization existed! That's good enough for me. Thanks!

[stig]

Glad to help!