Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

If you’ve been reading Dan Wood’s weblog or my del.icio.us links recently, you may have noticed that I’ve become something of a Javascript Object Notation enthusiast. Though JSON, an object serialization technology for Javascript, has languished in relative obscurity for awhile, I think there’s a lot of evidence that it’s about to assume a new prominence in the coming post-XML age.

Awhile ago it dawned on me that JSON bears more than a passing resemblance to old-school NeXT plists, and that it would be pretty natural to write an NSDictionary category that could deserialize a JSON string into a Cocoa object graph. I set about working on it whenever I could find the time (on the plane to NAMM last month, for example), but, sadly, my spare coding time just isn’t what it used to be these days (blame it on my daytime coding job and an increasingly busy social schedule).

Fortunately, it appears my LazyWeb influence is now strong enough that I no longer need to code my own ideas. I happened to mention my idea to Blake Seely during dinner at MacWorld, and he ran with it. Then, not to be outdone, Jonathan Wight revealed that he too had been working on a Cocoa JSON implementation. I haven’t had the time to look at either implementation yet, but at the very least I think the fact that we have not one but two really confirms JSON’s status as the web services technology of the moment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 10:55 am and is filed under Mac, Software, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.