On: Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API

[_pmf_]

It has to do with the awful XML generated by automatic tooling (SOAP by WCF and JEE).

Hand-generated XML can be just as nice as using hand-generated JSON, and on the other hand automatic domain-model-to-JSON mapping can be as ugly as any XML monstrosity.

[veesahni → _pmf_]

Most languages have the concept of arrays and hashes, which map unambiguously & idiomatically to JSON via generic serializers.

Creating idiomatic XML, on the other hand, is a little more tricky. Should something be a tag or an attribute? What should it be named?

[0xbadcafebee → _pmf_]

Though for the same dataset, XML will be slower to parse. For performance's sake use JSON.

[_pmf_ → 0xbadcafebee]

> Though for the same dataset, XML will be slower to parse. For performance's sake use JSON.

Loading a huge JSON file is almost certainly slower than using a SAX parser for a huge XML file. Maybe there are SAX like approaches for JSON, too.

[icebraining → _pmf_]

Yes, it's called "streaming". Like in XML, you can also used a mixed approach. See e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/gson/streaming

[arethuza → 0xbadcafebee]

I suspect that depends a lot on what platforms are used at the client and server.