The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one. (Douglas Crockford)
By Thomas Steiner. Written on . Work
(quoting Douglas Crockford)
Recently there is a lot of discussion about the XML vs. JSON question. Of course, JSON is easier for dealing with it directly from within a Javascript context. And yes, maybe it is less verbose than XML. But in the end, in my very own opinion, this is not really what it is all about. Kind of like the big endian / little endian question. It is just a different approach for solving the same category of problems.
You are at A, the service you are interested in is at B. So you send your query using HTTP GET or POST and wait for the response. Then you work either with an XML data structure or with a JSON data structure. Practically, they are almost always Turing-equivalent. To me as a developer it is way more important to have a forgiving API, an API that is based on the idea of agreeing to principles. Something like: this is a number (no matter if Integer, Long, Float, or Real). APIs are very likely to change over time. The less strong your typing, the less code you will break. The real challenge is bringing together sloppy web services (IMHO rather "good") and strict programming languages (IMHO rather "bad") like C# or Java. In the forthcoming months I will see what I can do about it.