JSON and JSON-RPC is one of the newest market baseplane and cross platform technologies. It is very compact and based on minimal service exchanges with unique path and requests. JSON the format is the result of bulky and bloated XML complaints.
JSON-RPC is the answer to the argument that XML RPC is too verbose and bloated and convoluted. JSON is just about as simple as you can get in data formats and it is becoming a great baseplane standard and is a tool that spans many platforms.
“Does distributed computing have to be any harder than this? I don’t think so.”
Can it be even simpler ?
JSON-RPC is lightweight remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC. It’s designed to be simple!
- specification
- python package implementing JSON-RPC
- more implementations
- services
- about JSON-RPC
XML is railed against plenty these days for being too verbose and leads to massive config invasions in your codez. But it deserves due respect for what it did.
What did it do you say?
Well, there was a time when data services rarely existed, connecting to trading partners or business partners was almost impossible. Connecting with partners directly to their RDBMS which is poor coupling and is not as message based as services.
Before XML was accepted it was a pipe-delimited, tab delimited, column delimited, ini file, proprietary binary serialization, locked down, non sharing, no service type world. It was the dark ages of data sharing. Hate on XML all you want, XML opened the doors.
Then comes XML, the executives and CTO magazines flooded with the term XML and large budgets signed on the word alone. But was it all hype or did it do something amazing? XML Amazing you say? With XML it was so simple it gave people no excuse not to open up information. A flawless victory on data nazi attitude. Is it the best, no, but it did what was necessary. We would not have the service based systems we have now of even JSON or other more micro formats at all if it weren’t for XML. Both HTML and XHTML and XML are all responsible (javascript as well and MIME) for delivering the simplistic base platform which all programmers can write to to instantly make their apps standard, the web and services that live on them.
After XML… Yes, XML did the amazing… It freed data into services. The web was also instrumental in this effort itself but when systems started working so closely together the exchange and mapping of data quickly became troublesome. Before web services emerged, client/server, remoting, RPC or other more closely coupled communication connections ruled the day. XML with web services helped to push the service model in addition to other technologies such as SOAP bloated but XMLRPC, REST, JSON, have emerged in stronger force or late because they are better iterations and less enterprise-y and simpler and more compact but I still believe that XML was in large part a tool that made data so simple to share that the capabilities and costs came down when people wanted to expose this data.
XML deserves to be a baseplane technology and is used where appropriate in baseplane tools and toolkits.
XML is recently 10 years old, seems like the average for standards to truly take hold and influence. Same with CSS, XHTML, the DHTML that later became AJAX and javascript kits of today. They are all stepping platforms.
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