gojson

Yeah, I almost never use map[string]interface{} when unmarshalling JSON. Most JSON has a static structure (and I'd argue that any JSON that doesn't is misbehaving). If the structure is static, you can simply use a struct that represents this[0]. If it doesn't, then you just use json.RawMessage to defer unmarshalling, but you can still dispatch to a finite number of structs that represent the universe of possible responses. [0] And no need to write it all out by hand - if you have a single example JSON response, you can generate it automatically: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson

Not sure where Java came into the conversation but I found a service[1] which I find really helpful for generating Golang structs from JSON. There is also a CLI tool[2] that does the same. [1]http://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/ [2]https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson

This looks like a good approach to dealing with heterogeneous JSON! (ie, JSON that has an unknown and/or variable structure.) I've always found encoding/json a little clunky for this. Shameless but relevant plug - if you do know the structure of your JSON in advance, I wrote a tool for automatically generating the appropriate struct definition for it: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson (I see these as complimentary tools, rather than conflicting or competing, since they would have two different use cases).

An offline version: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson

Shameless plug, but this looks like the exact inverse of gojson[0], which generates code (struct definitions) based on sample JSON. I originally wrote it when writing a client library to interface with a third-party API; it saves a lot of effort compared to typing out struct definitions manually, and a lot of type assertions compared to using map[string]interface{} everywhere. [0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson