JSON attraction

When something is becoming more complex and it is doing more things you need to do, then that begins to wasting people's time, communications and developers.

People like simple formats, these are easier to understand and have only the necessary things for what they really need to do.

XML came

Something like this has happened with  XML and JSON, first XML arrived to our world to meet the need for a separate standard programming language for exchanging data between different kind of platforms and this was solved it in an elegant way. Thus, each time that was needed to interchange data between two different platforms regardless of the programming language in which these were built, it was used XML. The data was using it, data bases were sending data using it, SOAP Web Services also used it, etc. It was the only option.

JSON came after

Then came some alternatives, one of which was JSON that was reaching the same goals of XML with some differences that made some things easier and others harder. Developers have more options and they can adapt better to the need of their platforms. It came with a promise to be faster with a lightweight format that is less complex than its predecessor.

Qualities of JSON

One advantage of JSON is its relationship with AJAX that needs to load data quickly and asynchronously without delaying page rendering. Social media pages need refresh their pages plenty times, small optimization can have a big impact on the efficiency and performance of a Web application. In addition, Big Data applications came with their own need, some of them were store and manipulate their colossal quantity of data, and JSON provides a faster way to use those giant data bases based on document files.

JSON is a data interchange format and it focuses in a simple way to enable validation and parse that are implemented in the language that is using it format, providing an easier way to handle its nested elements. In contrast, XML parse data using a required DOM (Document Object Model) or a Schema for the client side when it requires an XML response.

Considering the size of the XML and JSON documents, due to the complexity of XML, this uses a higher bandwidth when data is sent over a network. If we also consider more devices like iPhones and Tablets are popular today, such amount of data over a slow network cause delays page loads, hang ups and poor user experience. Currently XML is widely used and has its own benefits, but JSON has become the preferred for exchanging data on the Internet in recent years.