Book Image

JavaScript and JSON Essentials

By : Sai S Sriparasa
Book Image

JavaScript and JSON Essentials

By: Sai S Sriparasa

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using the developer tools


Almost all of the top browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer, have powerful debugging tools that help us understand the requests that are being made, and the responses that are coming back. JSON could either be part of the request, or be part of the response. Google Chrome, Safari and newer versions of Internet Explorer are shipped out with built-in developer tools. Firebug is a very popular web development toolkit that is available for Mozilla Firefox. Firebug is an external plugin and has to be installed on the browser; it is one of the earliest web development toolkits that was built to assist web developers while using Firefox.

Note

To install Firebug, please visit http://getfirebug.com/, and click on Install Firebug on the landing page.

These developer tools provide access to the HTML DOM tree, and give us a real-time understanding of how the HTML elements are arranged on the page. The developer tools come with a network...