Note: JSON is a
format and not a language
JSON can be used in web applications for data transfer.
Prior to JSON, XML was considered to be the chosen data interchange format. XML
parsing required an XML DOM implementation on the client side that would ingest
the XML response, and then XPath was used to query the response in order to
access and retrieve the data. That made life tedious, as querying for data had
to be performed at two levels: f irst on the server side where the data was
being queried from a database, and the second time was on the client side using
XPath. JSON does not need any specific implementations; the JavaScript engine
in the browser handles JSON parsing. XML messages often tend to be heavy and
verbose, and take up a lot of bandwidth while sending the data over a network
connection. Once the XML message is retrieved, it has to be loaded into memory
to parse it; let us take a look at a students data feed in XML and JSON.
