When should you use JSON or XML? Which one works better and where? In this short video, Mike and Dave discuss.
Dave Littman: Hi, Dave Littman, Truth and IT joined by Mike Matchett. Mike is contributing analyst here at Truth and IT. Mike, welcome.
Mike Matchett: Ah, thanks, Dave.
Dave Littman: So, hey we're talking today about JSON vs XML. Mike, there's a lot of conversation about both and where application developers choose one over the other. What are your thoughts as to where each fits?
Mike Matchett: This is kind of a right hand, left hand question as well. XML is a markup language and it's kind of structured more along the lines of what you'd expect out of a database management system or a relational database management system. JSON is your JavaScript object notation which came out of the developer community a little bit more coupled with loose dynamically defined data structures and document structuring of things and you can get away with a lot more in JSON than you can in XML. It has to be very statically structured. From a developer perspective you can obviously adhere to one standard or the other. I used to work on some websites where we deliver XML or JSON depending on what you requested on the API call. It's certainly true that they can cohabitate.
I think what you're gonna find though is XML is a little dated and people don't like to write static structures as much anymore. It's confining. It's not as agile. When you get into this new web world and you want agile data structures and you wanna be able to pass data back and forth in many different formats, you're probably gonna start seeing more and more JSON.
Dave Littman: Okay. Fabulous. Well let's leave it there. Mike, thanks very much. And thank you for watching. Watch other videos here with Truth and IT to learn more about these latest data center technologies. Mike, thanks again.
Mike Matchett: You're welcome, Dave.