The Importance of JSON in web development

Here I want to cover a topic that I feel has become an important part of any developer’s toolkit “The Importance of JSON in web development”. If you are looking for a JSON validator or beautifier, visit jsonexample.com.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write, and It is easy for machines to parse and generate. 

If you need more information about JSON, I recommend you to visit jsonexample.com to know more about JSON, including interesting facts and differences with XML. And if you come here looking for a JSON formatter, go here.

The Importance

With the rise of AJAX-powered sites, one of the most important facts for sites is to be able to load data quickly and asynchronously, without delaying page rendering. These capabilities are the ones that raises the JSON importance nowadays.

As I said before, JSON is a text-based data format following JavaScript object syntax, which was popularized by Douglas Crockford. Even though it uses JavaScript syntax, it is used independently from JavaScript, and many programming languages have the ability to read and generate JSON.

At the end JSON exists as a string. This reason is to many, the main point of JSON. And also, his most useful feature when you want to transmit data across a network. Then, once we have transmitted the data, we need to convert JSON into a JavaScript object to access the data. But as I said before, we don’t see this as a big issue because JavaScript provides a global JSON object that has many methods available to convert it.

Useful resources:

jsonexample.com
  • jsonexample.com Complete site with JSON validators, formatters and historical and interesting articles link
  • JSON Official site link
  • API Specification for building APIs in JSON link
  • JSON functions and methods for PHP link
  • Module JSON for Ruby link
  • JSON for modern C++ link
  • MySQL reference link
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