So I have this JSON, which then my activity retrieves to a string:

    {"popular":
        {"authors_last_month": [
         {
            "url":"http://activeden.net/user/OXYLUS",
            "item":"OXYLUS",
            "sales":"1148",
            "image":"http://s3.envato.com/files/15599.jpg"
         },
         {
            "url":"http://activeden.net/user/digitalscience",
            "item":"digitalscience",
            "sales":"681",
            "image":"http://s3.envato.com/files/232005.jpg"
         }
         {
            ...
         }
        ],
        "items_last_week": [
         {
            "cost":"4.00",
            "thumbnail":"http://s3.envato.com/files/227943.jpg",
            "url":"http://activeden.net/item/christmas-decoration-balls/75682",
            "sales":"43",
            "item":"Christmas Decoration Balls",
            "rating":"3",
            "id":"75682"
         },
         {
            "cost":"30.00",
            "thumbnail":"http://s3.envato.com/files/226221.jpg",
            "url":"http://activeden.net/item/xml-flip-book-as3/63869",
            "sales":"27",
            "item":"XML Flip Book / AS3",
            "rating":"5",
            "id":"63869"
         },
         {
            ...
         }],
        "items_last_three_months": [
         {
            "cost":"5.00",
            "thumbnail":"http://s3.envato.com/files/195638.jpg",
            "url":"http://activeden.net/item/image-logo-shiner-effect/55085",
            "sales":"641",
            "item":"image logo shiner effect",
            "rating":"5",
            "id":"55085"
         },
         {
            "cost":"15.00",
            "thumbnail":"http://s3.envato.com/files/180749.png",
            "url":"http://activeden.net/item/banner-rotator-with-auto-delay-time/22243",
            "sales":"533",
            "item":"BANNER ROTATOR with Auto Delay Time",
            "rating":"5",
            "id":"22243"},
         {
            ...
         }]
    }
}

It can be accessed here as well, although it because it's quite a long string, I've trimmed the above down to display what is needed.

Basically, I want to be able to access the items from "items_last_week" and create a list of them - originally my plan was to have the 'thumbnail' on the left with the 'item' next to it, but from playing around with the SDK today it appears too difficult or impossible to achieve this, so I would be more than happy with just having the 'item' data from 'items_last_week' in the list.

Coming from php I'm struggling to use any of the JSON libraries which are available to Java, as it appears to be much more than a line of code which I will need to deserialize (I think that's the right word) the JSON, and they all appear to require some form of additional class, apart from the JSONArray/JSONObject script I have which doesn't like the fact that items_last_week is nested (again, I think that's the JSON terminology) and takes an awful long time to run on the Android emulator.

So, in effect, I need a (preferably simple) way to pass the items_last_week data to a ListView. I understand I will need a custom adapter which I can probably get my head around but I cannot understand, no matter how much of the day I've just spent trying to figure it out, how to access certain parts of a JSON string..