As stated previously, JSON provides an easy-to-use and easy-to-operate interface for sending and receiving messages between services. For those that do not know, JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, which is one of the reasons that it interfaces with JavaScript so well. It mimics a lot of the behavior that JavaScript's objects do, except for some fundamental types (things such as functions). This also makes it quite easy to parse. We could use something such as the built-in JSON.parse function to turn stringified versions of JSON into objects, or JSON.stringify to turn one of our objects into its over-the-wire format.
So what are some of the disadvantages when utilizing JSON? We first have the problem that the format can get very verbose when sending data over the wire. Consider an array of objects that have the following format:
{
"name" :...