JSON: A Brief History, And a Look Into The Future
Is it pronounced “Jay-Sawn” or “Jason” ?
No matter how it is actually pronounced, JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation is impossible to avoid nowadays if you have ever found yourself sending data from a server to a client. However, it was not always used so universally.
Prior to JSON becoming a standard notation used across all languages and browsers; it was a simple, but obscure solution to a difficult problem.
Let’s explore three main questions:
- How was JSON first created?
- What problems did JSON solve, that were lacking in technologies at the time of its birth?
- How will sending data from server to client look in the future?
Let’s explore!
Circa 2001, at the peak of XML, JSON was discovered.
Using XML, or Extensible Markup Language was widely used to accomplish sending data from server to client.
As you can tell pictured above, it’s much less readable than JSON. XML was also a pretty beefy and complicated way of getting data from the server to client. To make matters worse, it was not compatible with all browsers, and it was a headache to send data from one language to another.
During this time, an Entrepreneur named Douglas Crockford was working on an application that required sending data back and forth between different browsers and languages. Something that was impossible to accomplish with the technologies at the time. Out of frustration, he came up with a way to embed Javascript in HTML tags, and sent this new object form server to client.
Many of the applications he used this special notation on happened to be written in JavaScript, so he commonly embedded Javascript between HTML tags to send back and forth. This led to the official name JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON.
JSON was the perfect alternative because it was light-weight, could be shared between many different languages, worked on many browsers, and required no plugins like Flash.
He soon began sharing this newly discovered workaround to the rest of the world on his site: https://www.json.org.
Shortly after posting on his site, word began spreading, and JSON began to snowball into the behemoth it is today!
Pictured above is a chart that displays the percentage of Stackoverflow questions throughout the years that had to do with XML vs JSON. There is a direct correlation between the rise of JSON, and the drop of XML.
XML is not dead in the tech world today, however, it has niched down to a few pockets of the tech industry. According to this article, “XML still survives in many places. It is used across the web for SVGs and for RSS and Atom feeds”1.
There is no doubt that with the dominance of Javascript, JSON is here to stay for the long haul.
However, there are some arguments floating around that XML can make a resurgence, or perhaps more accurately, its most important qualities will blend with JSON, and evolve into a hybrid.
JSON Is Simple, and XML Is Powerful
The reason for the massive spread of JSON because it was lightweight, and it much simpler to use, manipulate, and read compared its more complicated counterpart.
JSON, however, is not left without some deficiencies.
In some instances where extreme security is needed when sending data, JSON is seen as a less reliable format/ notation to use.
An example of this would be in the banking world. The need for a secure method of transferring data is dire…Enter XML.
XML in these scenarios perform much better because of properties that can be found in this article(2).
Conclusion
JSON is still king of the web, and will likely remain crowned for the foreseeable future. However, as security becomes more and more an issue, and necessity to optimize for, XML’s name will certainly begin popping up more in Stackoverflow questions.
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