Joy Dutta’s blog

Yeah, it seems like the emerging JSON format makes much more sense than having XML as the data-interchange format. In today’s data saturated world, web-programmers would be blissfully happy if the data doesn’t need some complex parsing. And JSON does just that. Consider a fragment of structured data that many “Ajax-ed” application of today could be receiving over the web:

firstname = Velma, lastname = Kelly

While the xml version could be (that needs parsing):

<name>
  <firstname>Velma</firstname>
  <lastname>Kelly</lastname>
</name>

JSON is:

{'firstname':'Velma', 'lastname':'Kelly'}

which doesn’t need parsing at all. The json data as a string can be converted to a javascript object and used like this:

var jsonObj = eval ( '(' + jsonObjAsString + ')' );
var fname = jsonObj.firstname; // or jsonObj['firstname']

Useful, right ? And consider how much less space and effort it takes to handle JSON. Clearly the preferred data interchange format for the dynamic web applications, many of which can’t even use XHR (XmlHttpRequest) because of crossdomain security issue of browsers. The solution is using dynamic script elements and using JSON just makes the whole effort a lot easier.

Here is Douglas Crockford’s interesting blog post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 7:11 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.