[uf-rest] Introducing JAHAH

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jan 5, 2006, at 4:21 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> Welcome to the list; I hope the rest of you were able to get your  
> message, since you don't appear to be subscribed yet.

I wasn't really planning to.. but what the hell, I'm subscribed to so  
many lists that one more doesn't matter much anyway :)

> On Jan 5, 2006, at 12:55 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> From what I understand, you're missing the point.  The key is that  
>> the <SCRIPT> tag can be used to load JAHAH across domains, thus  
>> the payload absolutely must be JavaScript of some sort.  JSON is  
>> the simplest subset of JavaScript to produce, so it's the only  
>> good choice here.
>
> Ah, okay. One man's bug is another's feature. :-)

Note that it's really only used as a wire protocol, and it's the only  
sensible one given the constraints.  You could come up with a custom  
JavaScript response all day long, but you might as well use something  
simple and standard.

>> YAML is technically a superset of JSON these days, but YAML is  
>> extremely difficult to parse and good parsers aren't available  
>> everywhere.  JSON is extremely simple to parse, and good parsers  
>> are available pretty much everywhere.  As far as Python goes, YAML  
>> is pretty much dead in the water.
>
> Interesting -- I've heard similar rumblings from the Ruby  
> community.  So, has anyone done a JSON<->XOXO bridge?

I'm not terribly sure why you'd want to do it, the use cases are  
pretty different and they're definitely not 1:1 on features.  JSON  
has no canonical hyperlink representation, and XOXO has no canonical  
representation for null, numbers, booleans, or string:value maps.   
JSON is the plist equivalent for the web.  In fact, it's awfully  
close in syntax to old-style NeXT plists (minus timestamps and data).

-bob