That whole MAX number of script executions (and the MAX in batch jobs) is why we steered clear of using Force.com for our fairly computationally intensive product. We still have other products with Force.com, but not this one.

Hi Abhinav,Came across your site here via google searches for various Apex/Vforce issues – it's great resource to read your findings (and those of the few other bloggers), and a comfort to see others dealing with similar challenges on this platform.I took a look at the JSONObject.cls, and unfortunately this is an example of when a direct port (to a language like Apex) does not work well. While it may be efficient to scan/parse in a per-character manner in C (or even Java), it's not practical in Apex. On script statements alone, you'll be consuming way too many statements per-character of the input stream. We'd have to do some profiling to see where the bulk of the statements are getting consumed here, but easy 2 easy-to-solve issues (besides the per-char scanner) pop out:1) The Value class is trying to model a “variant” type. That's fine, but each instance construction will eat 8 statements! 1 for the statement that invokes the new operator, 1 for the chosen constructor's assignment statement, and 6 for each of its member-field declarations. We can reduce this to 1 or 2 statements by combining the Prototype design-pattern with Apex's built-in clone method (which bypasses the declaration statements), plus a little bit of assignment/conditional-expression hacking – this logic can be wrapped in static constructor methods to keep the main code body reading clean. I have example code demonstrating the technique, if you're interested.2) The usage of StringBuffer. Unlike in Java, the Apex StringBuffer (i.e. a custom class) does not improve concatenation performance (Java's StringBuffer & StringBuilder improve memory-allocation efficiency from (N^2) to O(N)). Worse yet, it burns through additional script statements from the custom append method. Remove all usage of StringBuffer; use the += op on a String variable instead (name it 'buffer' if you like).Back to scanning – implementing a per-char scanner is not the way to go for lexical analysis in Apex; too many script statements per character. What I would do: a) Build static lookahead-char(s)-to-Scanner maps based on the required syntax (a map for unambiguous 1-char lookahead tokens, a map for unambiguous 2-char tokens, a map or maps to resolve ambiguities, etc…) b) Implement a Scanner for each token class (e.g. Word, Number, String-Constant, Operator-Literal, etc) c) each Scanner impl should use a Regexp with the Matcher.region and Matcher.lookingAt methods (excellent way to offload the heavy lifting of a tokenizer to native code) to efficiently pull out the proper token lexeme in 1 statement – now you're burning statements on a per-token basis rather than per-char! d) the nextToken() method would grab lookahead chars in 1 statement, then use the maps to get the appropriate scanner and thus the token. Enhance with a peekToken() method that caches peeks for use by subsequent peekToken() or nextToken() calls. Further enhance with a mechanism to save/restore lexer state (for when you need to try to parse a higher-than-token-level entity before making a decision, backtracking if necessary).I wish I had time to try my hand at optimizing JSONObject.cls (or even a from-scratch rewrite), but with Apex-native JSON serialize/deserialize on the horizon, it's probably not worthwhile. Still, it is never game-over 🙂 Sorry for the over-long comment; parsing is a side-topic of interest to me, and I enjoy hand-writing them when the need arises.

@Mike, forget to thank you for your awesome comment, I really liked your deep thoughts and views. If JSON parser is not coming natively in winter'12 release, I could have purposed to pair with you for writing a better open source Json Parser in Apex 🙂

Yeah @Mike, side projects are really fun, because you can pick your fav. technical area/languages/platform and develop something on top of it. That is really hard to do in a typical consulting project. I try to cool down that itch by doing a little bit of moonlighting and some time on weekend, but can't spare enough 🙁