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Better Than JSON?

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Re: Better Than JSON?

#21

Post by FullyFunctional »

dochtman wrote: post #12

I liked this CBOR vs MsgPack article from a while back (which also talks about size on the wire, not just performance): https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/6568.html SBE (Simple Binary Encoding) also makes some interesting performance claims. My pet peeve with both protobuf and capnp is the lack of an option type; they seem to be designed for languages with type systems that include null, rather than more modern languages…

Another vote for CBOR. I had actually designed my own binary JSON encoding out of frustration with BSON (which nobody should use IMO). My format was focused on compactness, but I dropped it when I found CBOR which was very similar and even slightly better in places. One notably thing about CBOR is the support for both Indefinite and Definite-Length Arrays and Maps (typically streaming generators need the former whereas parsing the latter can be more efficient).

Re: Better Than JSON?

#22

Post by intrasight »

mikece wrote: post #6

Everyone loves to hate on XML just because it can be verbose and some of the WS* protocols are complicated. But as a human-readable format it’s no harder to read or parse than JSON and legacy application support is orders of magnitude better than JSON. I’m not saying we should all use it but we shouldn’t be hating it either.

After 20 years of training, my meat-based XML parser is a well-tuned machine, and I prefer it over any of the other wannabes.

Re: Better Than JSON?

#25

Post by vollmond »

dragontamer wrote: post #16
mikece wrote: post #6

Everyone loves to hate on XML just because it can be verbose and some of the WS* protocols are complicated. But as a human-readable format it’s no harder to read or parse than JSON and legacy application support is orders of magnitude better than JSON. I’m not saying we should all use it but we shouldn’t be hating it either.

The issue with XML is that it was mostly pushed upon developers without any deeper understanding. So there's a ton of utterly crap XML applications out there with no rhyme or reason, and these crap XML enterprise apps are most developer's understanding of "real world XML". Similar to how terrible C++ code being all over the place is making people hate C++ the language. ------- XML can be used very well however: its u…

Around 2009, I worked on an application whose web interface and API were the same url -- it was served as an XML data file, with an XSLT transform to make it pretty for the browser. It was so comfortable.

Re: Better Than JSON?

#27

Post by lxe »

After half a decade of "better than JSON" mentality, fiddling with thrift, protobufs, custom serialization methods, I came to realize JSON/HTTP is usually the right tool for 90% of jobs.

Re: Better Than JSON?

#28

Post by generalk »

On XML:

  > Not sure anyone really knows how XML happened. It’s 
  > basically the W3C’s fault, I think? It’s okay for some 
  > things but in the end I’m not sure it’s something anyone 
  > actually wants to use, it’s just going to be one more of 
  > those mistakes of the past.
Look, I was doing web dev when XMLRPC was in. For simple API stuff, JSON ended up being worlds better. No fiddly XML preamble, no schemas, no envelopes, just enough structure to be able to quickly pull out a couple of fields and we're set. Beautiful.

But let me tell you how much I appreciated XML and schema validation when we were working with fifteen different partners all using a standardized XML format with a schema. These are cats who were putting XSDs into their IDEs, clicking generate to get a class, and then just not caring.

So when our integrations broke because they were sending XML payloads that failed schema validation, our conversations were so easy.

Before you say "yes but technically you could have done the same with $OTHER_THING" -- sure it's possible, but XML is ubiquitous. Shit, our tools were in Ruby.

XML can be a bear, but sometimes you need a bear.

Re: Better Than JSON?

#29

Post by rhabarba »

tgb wrote: post #14
rhabarba wrote: post #2

S-expressions are the most logical representation of data structures. “CAR”/“CDR” are not a part of the expression syntax, so this argument against them won’t matter.

I didn't read that as complaining about CAR/CDR, but rather it was making a joke: the section header is "Cons".

Ah. Too sophisticated...

Re: Better Than JSON?

#30

Post by captrb »

mikece wrote: post #6

Everyone loves to hate on XML just because it can be verbose and some of the WS* protocols are complicated. But as a human-readable format it’s no harder to read or parse than JSON and legacy application support is orders of magnitude better than JSON. I’m not saying we should all use it but we shouldn’t be hating it either.

Markup character and namespaces aside, I think what makes JSON easier to read is that it is more explicit about whether a child object is a singleton or a list, where XML requires you to consult the schema for minOccurs and maxOccurs.
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