Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

XML and JSON

Both XML and JSON are used by web services to represent structured sets of data or objects.

As discussed in previous sections, XML uses a syntax based on tags and properties, and values for those tags; for example, the File menu of an application, can be represented as follows:

<menu id="m_file" value="File"> 
  <popup> 
    <item value="New" onclick="CreateDocument()" /> 
    <item value="Open" onclick="OpenDocument()" /> 
    <item value="Close" onclick="CloseDocument()" /> 
  </popup> 
</menu> 

JSON, on the contrary, uses a more economic syntax resembling that of C and Java programming languages. The same menu in JSON format will be as follows:

{"menu": { "id": "m_file", "value": "File", "popup": { "item": [ {"value": "New", "onclick": "NewDocument()"}, ...