The Future of JSON

I am a huge supporter of JSON as a means of communicating with the server side in an Ajax application (you can use JSON as a means of communication on all tiers of an application using a library, but I'm going to mainly focus on the client side for this post). I was looking into the future of JSON and found two great posts by John Resig.

The first is about the need for native JSON support.

The post goes into a lot of detail about the performance benefits of JSON and has some great code samples.

Below is the summery excerpt from the post.

The current, recommended, implementation of JSON parsing and serialization is harmful and slow. Additionally, upcoming standards imply that a native JSON (de-)serializer already exists. Therefore, browsers should be seriously looking at defining a standard for native JSON support, and upon completion implement it quickly and broadly.

To get the ball rolling, I recommend that you vote up the Mozilla ticket on the implementation, to try and get some critical eyes looking at this feature, making sure that it's completely examined and thought through; and included in a browser as soon as possible.

You can read the full post here.

The second post is about the current state of JSON and goes into detail about ECMAScript proposals for the API.

Below is an excerpt from the post about the Mozilla implementation of native JSON.

Mozilla Implements Native JSON - Mozilla was the first to implement native JSON support within it's browser. Note, however, that this is not a web-page-accessible API but an API that's usable from within the browser (and by extensions) itself. This was the first step needed to implement the API for further use.

Here is an example of it in use (works within an extension, for example):

var nativeJSON = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/dom/json;1"]
    .createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIJSON);
nativeJSON.encode({name: "John", location: "Boston"});
// => '{"name":"John","location":"Boston"}'
nativeJSON.decode('{"name":"John","location":"Boston"}');
// => {name: "John", location: "Boston"} 

You can read the full post here.

Hopefully the future will have native support for JSON. As usual John does a great job on the post and if you don't have John's blog on your feed reader I recommend adding it (he is a very good Ajax development reference).