Javia blog

JSON is the new XML.

JSON, the “JavaScript Object Notation”, is a very simple notation for representing hierarchical data. It achieves what XML was supposed to do, and in a very simple way.

While the XML spec is hundreds (thousands?) of pages, the JSON spec fits comfortably on one page. Although the name suggest an association to JavaScript, JSON is in fact language-agnostic. There are JSON libraries for almost any language out there.

Sample JSON fragment:

{
"name":"John",
"tel":["+16051231234", "+48885003300"],
"address":{"street":"Dyamond 8", "city":"San Francisco"}
}

JSON has elementary values (strings, numbers; e.g. “foo”, 10), arrays marked by square brackets (e.g. [2, 4, 8]), and maps (also named ‘objects’) which contain key:value pairs between curly brackets (e.g. {”name”:”John”, “age”:”10″}).

Because of its simple and uniform structure, JSON is very simple to parse (this is a major advantage over XML). JSON is more compact then XML. JSON is more ‘pure’, more elegant than XML. And because of its ability of representing arbitrary complex hierarchical structures, JSON is just as powerful as XML.

While XML had all the hype, JSON is quietly getting the job done.

Follow-up: quite funny, only one day after I wrote this article, there was a similarly-themed post on CEO’s blog: JSON for data exchange (vs. XML).