Re: XML and JSON

Walden H. Leverich wrote:

If this is a true webservice with WSDL and all that, than the payloads
are XML, and usually with children not attributes. As Joe mentioned,
it's definitely "efficiency challenged" (nice phrase), but it's also the
simplest, and there's something to be said for simplicity when working
between machines and technologies.

If the response is for an Ajax request then we go the JSON approach. Not
only because the size is (typically) smaller, but because it's really
nice to be able to rehydrate a complete object graph on the browser with
a simple eval statement (or in our case Prototype's
Ajax.Response.responseJSON property)

I don't know that I call SOAP simpler than JSON, but it's more standardized, I guess. It's just that the majority of the standarized junk is pretty useless in many circumstances, primarily the Ajax type of request. As Walden points out, JSON is designed specifically for quick movement of data between machines - structures on the wire. This is the part that I've had to rewrite so many times over the years, and its amazing how little work it is with JSON.

Joe