JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange.

JSON objects contain data in a consistent format that can be passed and programmatically consumed more easily than the data in report formats. A JSON object is an unordered set of name/value pairs, so it tends to be self-explanatory, like XML, but it is less bulky.

Parameters for JSON objects are passed in the following format: ParameterName:parameterValue. A proper JSON object begins with a left brace { and ends with a right brace }. Each name in a pair is followed by a colon (:) and then the corresponding value. The name/value pairs are separated by commas.

Example 16-17 displays a fragment from a JSON document that shows how you might structure some simple data about a network device.

Example 16-17 JSON Structure of a Network Device

{
    “device”: {
      “interface”: “mgmt0”,
       “state”: “up”,
       “eth_ip_addr”: “192.168.10.175”,
       “eth_ip_mask”: 24,
                }
}

Both JSON and XML are human-readable formats. They are both independent of any specific programming language. However, there are a few differences:

Verbose: XML is more verbose than JSON and usually uses more characters to express the same data than JSON.

Arrays: XML is used to describe structured data, which doesn’t include arrays, whereas JSON includes arrays.

Parsing: Although most programming languages contain libraries that can parse both JSON and XML data, evaluating specific data elements can be more difficult in XML (although more powerful) compared to JSON.