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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T19:47:10+00:00

Suppose I have a remote JAX-RS JSON API from a server running Tomcat. I

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Suppose I have a remote JAX-RS JSON API from a server running Tomcat. I want to access this API from a C/C++ client. Are there any tools available to make life easier for the C/C++ client, e.g. code generators? Or does anybody have a suggestion for an alternative?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I have never heard of such a tool. More to the point, I suspect that such a tool (a C / C++ generator for JSON) is impractical.

    There are a number of reasons why. Some of the most significant ones are:

    • A key problem is that JSON doesn’t have schemas. This means that an API generator would have to resort to looking at example messages and try to infer what fields to expect and what their types are. This can be difficult and even theoretically impossible in some cases.

    • In languages like Java and C#, there are straight-forward “right ways” to generate object APIs; e.g. the JavaBeans conventions. In C++ and especially C, the conventions are not there, and there are complicating issues like container protocols and memory management to deal with.

    • In languages like Java and C# are runtime type-safe, and have various language level mechanisms are provided that allow you to use dynamic programming to deal with the JSON’s schema-less nature. For example, in Java you have reflection, proxy classes, dynamic code generation and dynamic code loading, all of which can help in dealing with JSON. In C and C++, these mechanisms are generally unavailable.

    In short, if you are using C or C++, JSON libraries are as good as it will get.

    FOLLOWUP

    As a comment points out, this may be feasible to implement in the context of a specific JAX-RS-based server implementation. You’d need to get hold of the internal metadata, apply the JSON mapping to it, and generate C / C++ APIs from that. The problems are:

    1. The generator implementation would be platform specific.
    2. The C / C++ based client would not be able to cope with changes to the effective schema without regeneration of the APIs and corresponding client code changes. (By contrast, a JSON library-based solution can in theory be coded to deal with unexpected new attributes, etc)
    3. You still have the container / memory management problem to deal with.
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