What is JSON, JSON-RPC and JSON-RPC-Java?

Michael Clark writes "Seen those funky remote scripting techniques employed by Orkut, Gmail and Google Suggests that avoid that oh so 80's page reloading (think IBM 3270 only slower). A fledgling standard is developing to allow this new breed of fast and highly dynamic web applications to flourish. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and others. It is derived from JavaScript and it has similar expresive capabilities to XML. Perfect for the web as doesn't suffer from XML's bloat and is custom made for our defacto browser language. JSON-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC although it uses the lightweight JSON format instead of XML (so it is much faster). The XMLHttpRequest object (or MSXML ActiveX in the case of Internet Explorer) is used in the browser to call remote methods on the server without the need for reloading the page. JSON-RPC-Java is a Java implementation of the JSON-RPC protocol. JSON-RPC-Java combines these all together to create an amazingly and simple way of developing these highly interactive type of enterprise java applications with JavaScript DHTML web front-ends. " Click below to read more about it. "Now is the turning point. Forget that horid wait while 100K of HTML downloads when the application just wanted to update one field on the page. The XMLHttpRequest object has made it's way into all the main browsers with it's recent introduction into Opera and Konqueror (sans the Konqueror bug). This new form of web development now works on Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari 1.2, Opera 8 Beta and Konqueror 3.3 (with a much needed patch). Appeal to Konqueror users - please log into the KDE bugzilla and vote on this bug so you to can experience this wonderful thing. More details here: http://oss.metaparadigm.com/jsonrpc/ "

Comments

Malarky

[sporty]

This is a lot of junk except in exceptional cases.

We have machines that are now in the gigahertz. Even a 0.5 ghz machine can process XML with some speed.

We have machines that have tons of memory, so even an inefficient DOM parser which loves using memory, can handle a large XML packet (use sax for that).

We have parsers that are a bit smarter than the slow ones, namely XML-Pull parsers and SAX.

When implementing someone else's protocol, something that is readable is awesome, because documentation isn't always there. Using XSLT, you can also port one XML type to another.

We have land lines that can transmit compressed data easily at 11kb/s (based on a 56k modem).

All json provides, is a way to eek out a few less cycles, a little less memory depending on how you parse it, and a few less bytes per second over XML. It's less readable and it isn't as widely used. What problem are we solving again?