Unifying Business, Data, and Code

Chapter 2. The Lingua Franca of Data: JSON

No matter what industry you work in, JSON is likely already used by your organization and that you have at least heard about it. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a standard and language-agnostic data interchange format inspired by a subset of the JavaScript programming language.

JSON is easy to learn. Its simplicity, both in terms of data types and grammar, was a significant contributing factor to its popularity. The specification that defines JSON states: “Because it is so simple, it is not expected that the JSON grammar will ever change. This gives JSON, as a foundational notation, tremendous stability.”

If you are working with data in some way, familiarity with JSON and its ecosystem is a powerful skill.

Note

This chapter is aimed at the more technical audience interested in implementing the methodology proposed in this book. See Chapter 3 to continue learning about these ideas in a business sense.

Introducing JSON

The origin of JSON dates back to the now-defunct Netscape, the first company ever founded to capitalize on the World Wide Web. Netscape is known for maintaining the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s, Netscape Navigator, and for inventing JavaScript, a programming language specifically designed for Netscape Navigator.

By around 1996, Netscape needed a way to exchange data in a lightweight and easy-to-read format. Netscape engineers started using an ad hoc, serializable version of the JavaScript syntax to represent ...