There seems to be a little bit of confusion among some developers as to what JSON is.
Some think some that JSON is a JavaScript serialization, or that it is just a way to pass JavaScript data around. Well, there are good reasons why this may be assumed. One is that JSON is usually used in HTML based client UIs, and it does have JavaScript in its acronym, JavaScript Object Notation. There are also many sites and YouTube videos that present JSON in a very JavaScript and browser client centric way.
It is not these things, though it is used like that (to some extent). The definition is plain enough:
The important points are:
- data-interchange
- text based
- began as a subset of JavaScript’s collections
- language independent
Note that there is nothing about Objects in there. The Object, that comes later in the spec, is what would be called a Map or Table in other scenarios. Yes, “but, JavaScript has Object Literal Syntax”, no matter.
I expect that the JSON word will lose its acroynm-ity in time and just become the name for a format. A similar thing happened to the OSGi trademark, it no longer means what it used to mean, and XML, means pointy brackets everywhere.
Updates
Aug 2, 2014: There is one scenario where thinking that JSON is just JavaScript object serialization is correct. When your working with JavaScript object serialization. Thus, when you send JSON from a browser client to a backend Java middleware, a library, such as GSON, will be used to deserialize the JSON to Java objects. In this case, contextualizing that in JSON “{ }” is an object, makes it clear that your process will need a Java class at that point.
