Difference between XML and JSON

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.

	The following is an example in XML:
	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
	<students>
	<student>
	<studentid>101</studentid>
	<firstname>Jony</firstname>
	<lastname>M</lastname>
	<classes>
	<class>Computers</class>
	<class>Maths</class>
	<class>Eng</class>
	</classes>
	</student>
	<student>
	<studentid>102</studentid>
	<firstname>Den</firstname>
	<lastname>g</lastname>
	<classes>
	<class>Finance</class>
	<class>UI</class>
	<class>Maths</class>
	</classes>
	</student>
	</students>
	Let us take a look at the example in JSON:
	/*This is an example students feed in JSON */
	{
	"students": { "0": { "studentid": "101", "firstname": "A1", "lastname": "B1", "classes": [ "A1", "b1", "c1" ] }, "1": { "studentid": "102", "firstname": "A2", "lastname": "B2", "classes": [ "A2", "b2", "c2" ] } }
	}

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