Web Technology: Theory and Practice

8.10 JSON

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a format that has gained a good amount of traction as a replacement to XML, especially as a light-weight alternative.

Aside note

Although JSON is a subset of JavaScript, it is completely independent of any programming language. Effectively it is a combination of two things–name-value pairs [hash table] and array-like [sequential] structures. Refer JSON Specifications at http://www.json.org/.

The basic principle used in JSON data structure is that data is considered to be occurring in name-value pairs. In many programming languages, this data structure manifests itself in several forms and names as a Class object (in Object oriented programming), a HashMap (in Java), Hash (in Ruby) etc. A JSON ...