JavaScript Object Notation

JSON is a syntax that allows you to encode arbitrary complex data structures into plain text. See structures for the related PSYC variable type.

JSON is increasingly popular with everyone who wants to escape the suffering involved with XML software development. Unfortunately JSON isn't always the best choice either, and developers who choose JSON frequently ignore the future extensibility problem once they are developing a protocol on top of the JSON syntax. JSON isn't even a particularely fast syntax, as our benchmarks have shown.

See Wikipedia:JSON-RPC for a protocol on top of JSON with version numbers and everything. The syntax itself is only a syntax, not the protocol. See RPC in comparison.

In PSYC itself, JSON may be used in some places as an intermediate solution until we have better support for arbitrarily structured data, but it has been determined as unsuitable for PSYC in general, as it has too many escaping rules that are just overhead within the framework of PSYC.

See also