On May 12, 2009, at 1:02 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
As I explained to someone who privately suggested ASN.1 as an alternative for OCCI, I'd rather remove my own testicles with a rusty spoon than do that again.
Sam is right. The thing is, ASN.1 might have had a chance if there were decent free tools. One of the reasons XML succeeded so widely is that there were multiple pretty-good open-source parsers available even before XML 1.0 shipped.
For JSON it's a lot less clear (at least for the famous enterprise users) due to the support, copyright, patent, etc. status surrounding third-party implementations. I know at least some of my clients have policies that would require developers to write the parser themselves - granted not a particularly difficult task but an unnecessary and error prone one.
We must live in different worlds. The Java programmers I know are like "Yeah, JSON, whatever", and for .NET, http://www.google.com/search?q=json%20.net turns up lots of stuff including from Microsoft's own Codeplex. Javascript/Python/Ruby, no problem. PHP I have no first-hand info, but since half the Ajax-heavy sites in the planet are PHP-backed, I can't imagine it's an issue. -T