What is JSON?
It stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is rapidly becoming the standard for transmitting data between applications. It is like XML but a lot less heavy weight. It is much easier to write a JSON parser than an XML parser. There are huge number of JSON parsers implemented in every language you can think of.
JSON != Javascript.
You don’t have to be programming in Javascript to use JSON. It did originate from Javascript which was given to us by Brenden Eich when he worked at Netscape to produce a scripting language for web browsers. He essentially made all the fundamental decisions as to the format of JSON. JSON was popularized as a format by the work of Douglas Crockford.
JSON is the anti-XML. It does not have a huge wad of cruft like XML schema, XSLT, XPATH, XML namespaces etc. sitting on top of it. It’s just a very lean efficient way to move data around.
What I find interesting about JSON is that it is an example of how the best standards don’t tend to come from committee based development. Really only one person designed this format. The rest of us just started using it because it was simple and good. The chief takeaway from all this:
The best standards are simple and have relatively few people involved in their creation.
