Once your client library has received a complete vBucket-to-server map message, it should use its favorite JSON parser to process the map into more useful data structures. An implementation of this kind of JSON parsing in C exists as a helper library in libvbucket, or for Java, jvbucket.

The libvbucket and jvbucket helper libraries don't do any connection creation, socket management, protocol serialization, etc. That's the job of your higher-level library. These helper libraries instead just know how to parse a JSON vBucket-to-server map and provide an API to access the map information.