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I'd like to know the first guy to send json over the wire starting the ajax craze.
by Thiz 13y ago
I'd like to know the first guy to send json over the wire starting the ajax craze.
- niggler 13y agoI think Crockford (http://crockford.com/ http://crockford.com/) -- he is mentioned in the RFC: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt?number=4627 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt?number=4627
- DigitalJack 13y agoMore specifically, he wrote the RFC.
- jdminhbg 13y agoDouglas Crockford, as that was the first thing JSON (as a data format) was used for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#History
- udp 13y agoWell, it's possible an object was transmitted as JavaScript source (to be decoded using eval) before the JSON spec existed.
- chubot 13y agoCrockford has said that people were using JSON before he "discovered" it. That's why he says he discovered rather than invented it. Unfortunately I don't remember who those people were, but anyone who used XmlHttpRequest, which was apparently there in the 90's, could have used it.
- rsl7 13y agoI made up and used something similar to JSON in 1996. It's not difficult to think up if you're trying to find the simplest possible text-based hierarchical data format. There were a lot of variations on this idea.
- aaimnr 13y agoAjax craze started with XML. JSON came later.
- account_taken 13y agoAjax started with Al Gore, without whom the internet would have never been invented :p
- account_taken 13y agoWow everybody serious on ycombinator. Can't even make a joke about Al Gore anymore.
- gruseom 13y agoIt's not that everyone's serious, it's that this community's greatest fear is that HN will get overrun by frivolous comments and other weeds. As a result, one of the tradeoffs that's evolved is that people reflexively downvote jokes. (Non-funny jokes get hammered particularly hard.) It's best not to take it personally and work on one's noise/signal ratio.
- mortenjorck 13y agoI've mostly avoided trying to be funny on HN, but I've been voted up for cracking wise on a few occasions, and have voted up things that made me genuinely laugh. It's a dreary business trying to analyze humor, even more so to analyze what kind of humor plays well at Hacker News, but I'd say the more original the joke, and the more the joke makes you think afterward, the better it will do. As an aside, my goodness, this is such an HN comment.
- bdowney 13y agoThat's because that joke stopped being funny 10 years ago.
- jtheory 13y ago
- nobodysfool 13y agoJSON is great for sending javascript objects over the network. However, the way most people use it, they'd benefit from switching to CSV files instead. JSON has a lot of overhead (each instance of each object has to have a name), but it's better than xml.
- Stratoscope 13y agoThat's true, but the JSON data is sent over the wire with gzip compression. All those repeated names compress out very nicely. CSV is still probably more compact than JSON even when compressed, but the difference isn't nearly as much as you'd expect from the raw textual version. Of course it gets expanded back to the full text in the browser, but that gets parsed and discarded right away. When I read CSV in JavaScript, for convenience I usually end up converting it to in-memory objects that resemble the JSON object that I would have downloaded otherwise. So at least in that case there isn't much difference in memory use either.
- mpyne 13y agoAlso browsers are much more likely to be able to optimize the parsing of JSON back into a DOM than they are to be able to optimize the JS that would be used to parse the CSV.
- iso8859-1 13y agoCSV files are simply lists of tuples. You can do lists of lists in JSON. Your overhead will be two characters (opening/closing braces) per tuple (one if you skip the newline, which you can't skip in CSV), plus a dozen characters for the whole file. I don't think that's a lot of overhead, seeing that you get the benefits of a format that is actually standardized. Example (CSV): name,age James,32 Nina,10 Helga,90 JSON: {"fields":["name","age"], "content":[ ["James",32], ["Nina",10], ["Helga",90] ]} Don't tell me it's harder to parse, cause you'd have to do the index→fieldname conversion in CSV too.
- teyc 13y agoCSV isn't standardized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values#Lack_of_a_standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values#Lack_of_... There are a lot of questions regarding use of quotation, new lines etc. JSON's standard is that it should be able to be eval'd by javascript interpreter. Even then, date handling is less than ideal.
- kragen 13y agoIt was popularized with the release and subsequent reverse-engineering of GMail. Maybe someone was doing it before that.
- pbreit 13y agoMichael Peachey's "General Interface" (sold to Tibco) was doing Ajax quite awhile before the term was coined. The Ajax craze was, of course, with XML (ie, the X in Ajax). JSON is certainly a more pleasant format to work with but not a huge leap over XML. But it was lame that XML was melded on such as it was.
- corford 13y agoI don't know if it was JSON that started the ajax craze... I remember it being Google Suggest that brought the potential of Xmlhttprequest in to the mainstream (and there being a brief period thereafter where no one could decide whether to call the technique "xmlrpc" or "ajax"). JSON sprung up in a mainstream way a year or so after all that (or my memory is crap... which is quite possible!).
- brent_noorda 13y agoI'll take credit for that one. In the mid 90's at Nombas we created what we called DSP (Distributed Scripting Protocol) that serialized data (and functions) into js objects (now known as JSON) to be both human- and computer- readable and solve a lot of other problems (one of them being the danger of IBM's XML-hell, or Microsoft's DCOM or Suns's i-forget-what-it-was-called-java-thing taking over). We showed it doing super-duper cool stuff at ECMA committee meetings, and to the magazines and trade shows of the day, and filed patents for just about everything now seen as "AJAX" or "dnode"--had a lot of fun, but also A LOT of trouble getting people to use it because they saw it as weird. Douglas Crockford's brilliant move was to create the web site http://json.org/ http://json.org/ By putting the ".org" at the end he tricked the world into believing it was an accepted standard.