JavaScript and JSON Essentials

If you fancy a less verbose data format than CSV or XML, then JSON could be for you. This tutorial will teach you about using JSON with JavaScript for effective local storage or Internet transfers.

Overview

• Deploy JSON across various domains
• Facilitate metadata storage with JSON
• Build a practical data-driven web application with JSON

In Detail

The exchange of data over the Internet has been carried out since its inception. Delimiter-separated lists such as CSV and tag-separated languages such as XML are very popular, yet they are considered to be verbose by a section of developers. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight text-based code to create objects to transfer data over the Internet. It is a data exchange format that is human-readable (like XML, but without the markup around your actual payload) and its syntax is a subset of the JavaScript language that was standardized in 1999.

JavaScript and JSON Essentials is a step-by-step guide that will introduce you to JSON and help you understand how the lightweight JSON data format can be used in different ways either to store data locally or to transfer data over the Internet. This book will teach you how to use JSON effectively with JavaScript.

This book begins with a brief refresher course on JavaScript before taking you through how JSON data can be transferred via synchronous, asynchronous, and cross-domain asynchronous HTTP calls. JSON is not just about data transfer; this book throws light on the alternate implementations of JSON as well.

You will learn the data types that JavaScript uses and how those data types can be used in JSON. You will go through the concepts of how to create, update, parse, and delete a JSON object. You will also look at the different techniques of loading a JSON file onto a web page, how to use jQuery to traverse through an object, and how to perform access operations. You will also go over a few resources that will make debugging JSON quick and easy.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to work with real-time JSON
• Transfer JSON data via asynchronous calls
• Fire cross-domain asynchronous requests
• Serialize and transmit data
• Build the Carousel application
• Understand alternate implementations of JSON
• Debug JSON quickly and efficiently

Approach

The book follows a tutorial-based approach and will teach you how to work with JSON tools, design JSON objects, and how to use different techniques to handle JSON data.

Who this book is written for

This book is a great resource for developers who would like to learn more about JSON and who wish to apply it in their own projects. It will be useful to have some prior knowledge of HTML and JavaScript to help you understand the concepts covered in this book. Some familiarity with a server-side language such as PHP, C#, or Python would also be beneficial, but this is not compulsory.

Sai Sriparasa

Sai Sriparasa is a web developer and an open source evangelist living in the Stamford area. Sai was the lead developer for building Dr. Oz's website, and he has lead teams for companies such as Sprint Nextel, West Interactive, and Apple. His repertoire includes JavaScript, PHP, Python, HTML5, Responsive Web Development, ASP.NET, C#, Silverlight, and much more.