Preface

JavaScript and JSON Essentials is a one-stop resource that can be used for understanding and implementing JSON in various web applications. This book provides a comprehensive insight into how JSON can be implemented and integrated into your applications. Though JSON is one of the most popular data-exchange formats, the number of books available describing JSON and helping readers build a live solution is not high. This book is a comprehensive guide to JSON that begins with JavaScript basics, discusses the history of JSON, and then takes a step-by-step approach towards using JSON to build a live web application that is powered by JSON data.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, JavaScript Basics, is a basic refresher for common JavaScript concepts.

Chapter 2, Getting Started with JSON, introduces the audience to JSON, discusses the history of JSON, outlines the popular programming languages that support JSON, fires a Hello World program in JSON, and writes basic programs with different data types in JSON.

Chapter 3, Working with Real-time JSON, introduces the audience to complex JSON. The JSON used in this chapter will consist of multiple datatypes and multiple objects and will be multidimensional.

Chapter 4, AJAX Calls with JSON Data, goes over the requirements to successfully pass JSON over HTTP as JSON data has to transported over HTTP in real-world scenarios.

Chapter 5, Cross-domain Asynchronous Requests, introduces the audience to the concept of making asynchronous calls across domains. Since data is being transported across domains, users will be introduced to the concept of JSON with Padding.

Chapter 6, Building the Carousel Application, discusses the idea of a Carousel application and the required setup and dependencies such as, jQuery library, and jQuery Cycle plugin for the application.

Chapter 7, Alternate Implementations of JSON, discusses the non web-development implementation of JSON such as dependency managers, metadata stores, and configuration stores. The discussion would go forward and talk about the advantages of JSON over XML and YAML.

Chapter 8, Debugging JSON, introduces the powerful tools that are available to debug, validate, and format JSON. As the number of objects increases, the length of JSON increases too, which makes it difficult for the naked eye to validate JSON.

What you need for this book

JSON is language-and platform-independent, so readers can use an operating system of their choice. To serve live JSON, we need a live web server. There are parsers available for most of the popular server-side languages; readers can use a web server such as Apache, Tomcat, IIS, or any other web server and can pick a text editor of their choice.

Who this book is for

This book has been designed to cater to the needs of developers at all levels. This book contains numerous working examples, tips, and notes that will guide users through all the chapters. It is not required but would be good to have some knowledge about HTML and JavaScript. Some familiarity with server-side languages such as PHP, C#, or Python would be preferred, but not required.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code and the output being generated by the code are added to the book as screenshots. The name of the file will be shown as follows:.

json_helloworld.html

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: “Load the file in a web browser, and a pop-up box with the text Hello World! should be loaded on the page”.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Questions

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