JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files are a common way of serializing data. It was proposed by Douglas Crockford and is described in the RFC 7159 standard. In particular, they are good at storing complex data structures such as dictionaries. Many languages have strong libraries for JSON support. It is very common to store your program data in JSON files. It is a good format in which to save files and the like. It is also commonly used for storing input data for various simulation programs. It is far more human-readable and -writable than XML and has largely replaced it in some uses. For example, it has largely replaced XML in asynchronous browser/server communication. We will look into several libraries that you can use to access JSON files in Scala.
Here's a small tip for using some third-party libraries. If you download them from GitHub or some other source code repository and the project uses SBT, then the easiest way to use them in your software is to...