This seems like something that would lend itself to not tying itself to any specific implementation, yet it seems to be entirely based on a particular Java impl

This seems like something that would lend itself to not tying itself to any specific implementation, yet it seems to be entirely based on a particular Java implementation. It would probably be more useful if it more explicitly tied itself to the Java implementation (i.e. stop pretending to be its own thing) or were more abstract to be worth implementing in other languages. In the latter case it'd be helpful if the operations were part of the actual unified DSL instead of having a DSL for each transformation (with the implication that each transformation is applied individually?). EDIT: But if you abstract this away from Java, why not just use JSON Patch: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902