Advanced - Oj

# Advanced Features¶ ↑

Optimized JSON (Oj), as the name implies, was written to provide speed optimized JSON handling. It was designed as a faster alternative to Yajl and other common Ruby JSON parsers. So far it has achieved that, and is about 2 times faster than any other Ruby JSON parser, and 3 or more times faster at serializing JSON.

Oj has several `dump` or serialization modes which control how Ruby `Object`s are converted to JSON. These modes are set with the `:mode` option in either the default options or as one of the options to the `dump` method. In addition to the various options there are also alternative APIs for parsing JSON.

The fastest alternative parser API is the `Oj::Doc` API. The `Oj::Doc` API takes a completely different approach by opening a JSON document and providing calls to navigate around the JSON while it is open. With this approach, JSON access can be well over 20 times faster than conventional JSON parsing.

The `Oj::Saj` and `Oj::ScHandler` APIs are callback parsers that walk the JSON document depth first and makes callbacks for each element. Both callback parser are useful when only portions of the JSON are of interest. Performance up to 20 times faster than conventional JSON is possible if only a few elements of the JSON are of interest.