so if JSON works in Safari, which Anselm assures me is true; Then
there's fine prospects, after all, for mapping and location apps on the
iphone within community wifi nets ( e.g. San Francisco) --- using a
wifi mac address lookup for geolocation.
Anselm Hook wrote:
As Cameron points out XML is slower and I suspect many web 2.0 type
projects are now using JSON exclusively.
The problem however is that there's no formalization of how to shape
JSON.
We're still stuck at the "syntax" instead of the "semantics". So in
the switch to JSON we've lost inter-application and inter-vender
dialogue; except by those vendors also going out of their way to offer
traditional RDF/XML or GeoRSS or the like.
JDIL would permit users to mix-and match content from different
servers; without application developers having to resort to RDF/XML.
So this makes it a good thing.
It also (like RDF) is a "full" notation; able to express arbitrarily
complex graphs; not just directed-acyclic trees. You could for
example define a geometry namespace and then define a 50000 polygon
house and then instance it 50 times; to say describe a city
sub-division. Neither GML nor GeoRSS support this as far as I can
figure.
And it's also JSON... which is beautiful and elegant as opposed to
say XML.
To support JDIL the application developers job would be to is
formalize whatever ad-hoc JSON format they are publishing and to
possibly offer proxy gateways to get around rpc security issues.
What's especially interesting is that there's an incentive to use JDIL
even if nobody else is.
In one of my projects I publish JSON - for example:
http://hook.org/note/json_query?path=/venice/chat
There is no particular way that my object data is arranged except as
an implicit agreement between my server side Ruby On Rails database
and my client side Javascript application. In fact the only way that
I myself as the developer can know or share what is being published is
to send somebody a copy of the source code for the application; I have
no schema definition on the transport layer. If I switch to using
JDIL instead of just JSON then that self-imposed formalism makes my
data-structures more explicit to myself. It becomes a secondary
benefit that other people can subscribe to the streams of content that
I publish.
There was a bit of discussion about Chris'es idea on #swig and the
following URL came up which has some interesting thoughts about
encoding RDF in JSON:
http://www.thefigtrees.net/lee/blog/2007/01/using_rdf_on_the_web_a_vision.html
Some lessons from being a game developer - and having to transport
data between servers and clients (albeit more for 3d video games
rather than for webby 2.0 social apps):
People defining new grammers for vector geometry may want to remember
to keep VRML and X3D in mind; these are grammers that express not just
static content but things like multiple instancing, separation of
skinning from geometry, switch nodes and behavior nodes as well as
constraints.
As well, and why JSON appeals, is that one definately seeks some kind
of grammer that is terse, highly expressive and that can be "unpacked"
with a minimum of labour on the client side. Typically a client side
is less powerful than the server side; it is easiest to just "play
back" the content; not have to parse it. Javascript in particular is
mind-numblingly slow at doing array inserts and the like; it isn't
even just the XML parsing... you really don't want to do any
transformation on the data once you get it if at all possible.
Finally, rich client apps are usually going to have some kind of "read
through" database; even for just a single sessions activity.
Javascript clients often will have a caching read through query layer;
where queries only make it to the server if the client does not have
the data cached already. So the data transport model should allow one
to easily add new database columns or objects to an already existing
pool of data on the client (not just replace it).
- a
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