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#Json online formatter free code#
Converting JSON to a JavaScript object takes one line of code and doesn't require any prior knowledge about the object being parsed.Īlthough JSON is a relatively concise, flexible data format that is easy to work with in many programming languages, there are some drawbacks to the format. Converting XML to a JavaScript object can take from tens to hundreds of lines of code and ultimately requires customization based on the specific object being parsed. In addition to being more verbose (exactly twice as verbose in this case), XML also introduces some ambiguity when parsing into a JavaScript-friendly data structure.
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Below is a version of the data you saw above, this time in XML: Jonathan Freeman 4 true Spantree Technology Group InfoWorld Lilly Raccoon However, XML is becoming less and less common in new systems, and it's easy to see why. Today, JSON is the de-facto standard for exchanging data between web and mobile clients and back-end services.Īs noted above, the main alternative to JSON is XML. As Kostyantyn Kharchenko says: "In many ways, the success of REST is due to the JSON format because of its easy use on various platforms." As web developers came to prefer JSON over XML, so too did they come to favor REST over SOAP. One of the big advantages of programming using REST APIs is that you can use multiple data formats, not just XML, but JSON and HTML as well.
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Over the course of the '00s, another Web services technology, called Representational State Transfer, or REST, began to overtake SOAP for the purpose of transferring data. JSON was much easier for people to read and for browsers to parse. JavaScript already had objects, which are a way of expressing data within the language, so Douglas Crockford took a subset of that expression as a specification for a new data interchange format and dubbed it JSON. But XML was verbose and difficult to manage in JavaScript. Originally, this data was transferred in XML format (see below for an example) using a messaging protocol called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). When the contents were loaded, the data could be manipulated, saved, and displayed on the page using JavaScript, the universal programming language in browsers. Instead of reloading the entire contents of the page, clicking the refresh button would trigger a web request that would load in the background. Meanwhile, the capability of making web requests in the background while a page was being shown, which had recently been introduced in Internet Explorer 5, was proving to be a viable approach to loading data incrementally for display. This pattern was sluggish and inefficient, requiring the browser to re-render everything on the page even if only a section of the page had changed.īecause full-page reloads were costly, web developers looked to newer technologies to improve the overall user experience. When a user clicked on a link or a button in the browser, a request would be sent to the server, the server would prepare the information needed as HTML, and the browser would render the HTML as a new page. At the time, the browser served mainly as a dumb client to display information, and the server did all of the hard work to prepare the content for display. In the early 2000s, interactivity on the web began to transform. To understand the usefulness and importance of JSON, we'll have to understand a bit about the history of interactivity on the web. Although the notation is a subset of JavaScript, these types are represented in all common programming languages, making JSON a good candidate to transmit data across language gaps. JSON is a generic data format with a minimal number of value types: strings, numbers, booleans, lists, objects, and null. A structure like the one above may be passed from a server to a web browser or a mobile application, which will then perform some action such as displaying the data or saving it for later reference. It includes a first and last name, the number of times the person has logged in, whether this person is a writer, a list of companies the person works with, and a list of the personâs pets (only one, in this case). The structure above clearly defines some attributes of a person. Here's an example of data encoded in JSON: You can work with data as JavaScript objects, with no complicated parsing and translations.You can send a JavaScript object to a server in pure text format.You can receive pure text from a server and use it as a JavaScript object.JavaScript also has a built in function for converting an object into a JSON string: JSON.stringify().JavaScript has a built in function for converting JSON strings into JavaScript objects: JSON.parse().
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