JSON is the Web’s Esperanto

JSON, the Esperanto of the Internet

PHP and Javascript do not live in a vacuum. They need each other, and need to share data. Javascript developed many wonderful technogies, including AJAX and the Javascript-Object Notation syntax, called JSON. Arrays are great, but they don’t travel well when communicating with another website. PHP added a function called “Serialization” which turned arrays into strings. Great, but it causes many problems. JSON has a neat, elegant way to reprsent objects with a stringusing curly braces and brackets. Curly braces represent objects with keys & values in Javascript, brackets are for simple arrays. So JSON uses those in a string and voila, you have JSON.

JSON is so simple, works so well, many other technologies use it. RDF uses it, so does Java & C+. So JSON allows many different kinds of platforms to talk to each other. This greatly increases Website’s possibilities.