Chapter 2. Getting Started with JSON

JSON or JavaScript Object Notation is a very popular data interchange format. It was developed by Douglas Crockford. JSON is text-based, lightweight, and a human-readable format for data exchange between clients and servers. JSON is derived from JavaScript and bears a close resemblance to JavaScript objects, but it is not dependent on JavaScript. JSON is language-independent, and support for the JSON data format is available in all the popular languages, some of which are C#, PHP, Java, C++, Python, and Ruby.

Note

JSON is a format and not a language.

JSON can be used in web applications for data transfer. Prior to JSON, XML was considered to be the chosen data interchange format. XML parsing required an XML DOM implementation on the client side that would ingest the XML response, and then XPath was used to query the response in order to access and retrieve the data. That made life tedious, as querying for data had to be performed at two levels: first on...