Programming Tutorials

XML vs JSON in AJAX

By: Emiley J. in Ajax Tutorials on 2009-01-17  

If you are working with AJAX, you probably use either one of them or both of them. However there are pros and cons of using each of them. One major drawback of using XML is the speed. XML requires two tags for every data point. These additional data in transmission between the server and the client slows down the data exchange and wastes bandwidth.

In JSON (Java Script Object Notation) objects are small compared to XML documents and working with them is more memory-efficient. While constructing an XML the document may be rather too big just to pass a few values back to the client. This long document takes more memory, The easier method to make a more compact document and to easily parse is provided by JSON.

The other great benefit of JSON is the parsing method with JavaScript's eval() function. You don't need other libraries to parse the JSON document and hence you do not have to worry about cross-browser functionality as you would do in XML parsing. As long as the client browser supports JavaScript the eval() function can be used to parse JSON and interpret data.

So in most cases JSON is a better choice if you the option to choose between XML and JSON.

An example of a JSON data object:

{"conversion":{
"decimal": "120",
"hexadecimal": "78",
"octal": "170",
"binary": "1111000B"}
}

An example of an XML document to store the same data object as above:

<conversion>
<decimal>120</decimal>
<hexadecimal>78</hexadecimal>
<octal>170</octal>
<binary>1111000B</binary>
</conversion>





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