It used to just be a Javascript object literal... now it's 'JSON'

I love how marketing and hype in the tech industry take what's a normal API, function, etc, and transform it into the wizard behind the curtain. I can remember working on the laszlo platform (before it was openlaszlo) and making asynchronous http calls with XML. About 2 years later I started hearing all this hype about 'AJAX' and not really paying attention at first. When I finally looked under the hood, I though, "Wow, that's just what we were doing at Recursive a few years ago."

Now I'm starting to hear the hype bubble up about JSON. It stands for "JavaScript Object Notation", and it's just a javascript object in literal form. Well it turns out that that object literal notation is now being used as a data interchange format. So there's nothing new to learn here if you've build Javascript systems before. There's only the leap to be made of building entire systems ( including JSON parsers in python, ruby, etc ) in JSON.

Restful systems now have also come into vogue. My predictions is that language oriented programming will be the next hot programming technique (I kind of talk about it here). But we'll need better marketing and buzz to turn it over to the programmer masses.

Posted by Timothy Washington on 2007.06.14| Original post

#archive #frye #thebox