Re: XML and JSON

["Alfredo Delgado" <adelgado@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm a big fan of JavaScript Object Notation. I treat JSON vs. XML as
internal vs. external views of data. Unless I'm dealing with a product that
already outputs XML (I'm lazy), I always choose JSON over XML for AJAX.

I fall in the same numberless bucket of assuming it performs better with fat
DTDs but I find it much more natural to write JS code that accesses a native
data structure.

Alfred

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Thorbjorn asked a good question: what are the benchmarks between XML and
> JSON.  And those are hard to come by, since people rarely write for
> both, and when they do (aka Google), the JSON is usually just a
> serialized version of the XML, so you don't get a good comparison.
>
> There are really two measures of performance, I think: message size and
> processing cycles.  Represent an arbitrary record in JSON is pretty
> efficient:
>
> [ "customerid" : 1123454, "name" : "Joe Pluta", "email" :
> "junkmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" ]
>
> The XML is not much worse:
>
> <customer customerid = 1123454 name = "Joe Pluta"
> email="junkmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" />
>
> This of course assumes that you use attributes rather than children.
> Children make XML blow up like a balloon:
>
>  <customer>
>   <customerid>1123454</customerid>
>   <name>Joe Pluta</name>
>   <email>junkmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</email>
>  </customer>
>
> Obviously the second version is efficiency challenged, although you'll
> see a lot of it because it's easier to program and easier to create the
> WSDL.
>
> Where it gets interesting is when you want to send plain data.  I can
> send an array of strings like this:
>
> [ "ID01", "ID02", "ID03" ]
>
> That's it.  I send that and the application on the other side can
> translate it right back to an array of strings.  Nothing to it.  I'm not
> sure what the XML equivalent is.
>
> I've also read that the stricter nature of JSON means that it processes
> more quickly.  I don't have numbers to back that up, though.
>
> And that's just JSON vs XML.  It gets much worse with SOAP.  SOAP
> messages are hugely overblown, requiring hundreds of extra bytes just to
> send a simple message.  But there's no silver bullet - neither JSON nor
> XML is perfect for everything.  SOAP is better in a distributed
> environment where clients and servers are widely separate, not nly
> geographically but programmatically: if one company wants data from
> another company, SOAP is often a better fit, the same way that EDI is a
> better fit than a flat file.
>
> On the other hand, if you're writing a multi-tiered application and you
> want to speak between tiers, JSON is probably the best representational
> language.  Of course, hardcoded binary data structures are even faster,
> so once again, there's no single answer.  But with JSON the messages are
> a lot easier to verify.
>
> Joe
>
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