Welcome to Geoff Hayward's Weblog

The Elegance of JSON
16 February 2012

For those of you that do not know the JSON format; JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is a very powerful and fast way of getting and using data. It is fast because the client does not need to parse it unlike XML. At your keyboarding finger tips you have a JavaScript collection ready to roll. But the best part of it is it circumvents the cross domain malarkey. That's right no proxy needed.

So let me give you a demo using a well-known website that lets you feed on their data. Of course this demo is only a demo and I would not use script tags in the body of the document if it was a live website.

<div id="twitter"><!-- a Handle --></div>
 
// This function must be known before the call
function getTweets(data)
{
    var html = '';
    for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++){
        html += '<p>' + data[i].text + '</p>';
    }
    document.getElementById('twitter').innerHTML = html;
}
 
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=YOURUSERNAME&callback=getTweets" ></script>

The example I created about will right out the main text from all of your tweets paragraph by paragraph thus demonstrating the elegance of JSON. Try it yourself but, remember to check the API of the data feed you are getting JSON from to see what tasty nibbles are in store.