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

Click below to read more about it.

[Threni]

With all that stuff going on it's a wonder it didn't click itself!

Perfect for the web? I don't think so

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

Example in JSON:

{"menu": {
"id": "file",
"value": "File:",
"popup": {
"menuitem": [
{"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},
{"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},
{"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}]}}}

The same thing in XML:

<menu id="file" value="File" >
<popup>
<menuitem value="New" onclick="CreateNewDoc()" />
<menuitem value="Open" onclick="OpenDoc()" />
<menuitem value="Close" onclick="CloseDoc()" />
</popup>
</menu>

Perfect for the web as doesn't suffer from XML's bloat and is custom made for our defacto browser language.

Take a look at those examples and try to explain how is JSON free from bloat when in fact it is even more bloated and slightly more difficult to read and write by humans? It's just another notation with no obvious advantages.

Re:Perfect for the web? I don't think so

[metaparadigm]

Yes, although this is an XML DTD discussion. Most DTDs including the XML-RPC and SOAP DTDs don't encode using attribute values but instead using child elements with character data (apparently this is the XML best practice). Much Much bigger.

Also, the JSON takes one line of code to parse and access natively in our defacto web browser language 'JavaScript'.

The second requires a bloated JavaScript XML parser (as this is not built in to many browsers) and CPU intensive processing and a cumbersome API to get the data out. Also try doing 100 RPC calls a second with SOAP in a browser (this can be done with JSON-RPC on a local network - 10ms round trip on simple methods).

Re:I have only one point to make.

[Malc]

Web interfaces have two massive advantages: no need to install anything. They also work just about anywhere.

You're right: a web page for a complicated will rarely match the UI of a dedicated application. Take Outlook's Web Access UI: it's pretty amazing, especially if you're using IE. It can be used almost anywhere without having the latest version of Office installed. It's still damned clunky compared with real Outlook, but sometimes it's better than nothing.