SwiftyJSON is a Swift framework built to remove the need for optional chaining in normal JSON serialization.

You can download it here: https://github.com/SwiftyJSON/SwiftyJSON

Without SwiftyJSON, your code would look like this to find the name of the first book in a JSON object:

if let jsonObject = try NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: .AllowFragments) as? [[String: AnyObject]],
let bookName = (jsonObject[0]["book"] as? [String: AnyObject])?["name"] as? String {
    //We can now use the book name
}

In SwiftyJSON, this is hugely simplified:

let json = JSON(data: data)
if let bookName = json[0]["book"]["name"].string {
    //We can now use the book name
}

It removes the need to check every field, as it will return nil if any of them are invalid.

To use SwiftyJSON, download the correct version from the Git repository - there is a branch for Swift 3. Simply drag the “SwiftyJSON.swift” into your project and import into your class:

import SwiftyJSON

You can create your JSON object using the following two initializers:

let jsonObject = JSON(data: dataObject)

or

let jsonObject = JSON(jsonObject) //This could be a string in a JSON format for example

To access your data, use subscripts:

let firstObjectInAnArray = jsonObject[0]
let nameOfFirstObject = jsonObject[0]["name"]

You can then parse your value to a certain data type, which will return an optional value:

let nameOfFirstObject = jsonObject[0]["name"].string //This will return the name as a string

let nameOfFirstObject = jsonObject[0]["name"].double //This will return null

You can also compile your paths into a swift Array:

let convolutedPath = jsonObject[0]["name"][2]["lastName"]["firstLetter"].string

Is the same as: