JSON response specification

[Roberto De Almeida]

On 11/14/06, Nathan Potter <ndp at opendap.org> wrote:
> I skimmed you spec and my first response to this idea of JSON is to
> ask - can you do it with an XML representation?

Yes.

> And does our XML representation  suffice? Combining the DDS and DDS
> is an idea whose time has come, but it would be cool if we could use
> a standard representation.

I haven't read the DDX specification but I'm pretty sure it suffices.
But then, the DDS, DAS and DODS responses together are also
sufficient.

My point is not to replace or compete with the DDX response by
creating a new standard representation. My point is that I'm using the
JSON response _today_: I've written an AJAX interface based on the
JSON response that retrieves data from pydap and displays it using
Google Maps, and I plan to write more applications like this. And
since at least _I_ will be using JSON to talk to a DAP server, I
believe it's better to standardize the response -- this way, if
somebody else wants to use it, at least there won't be two
incompatible implementations.

Don't get me wrong, I plan to support the DDX as soons as the spec is
out -- Pydap already has some stub code both on the client and on the
server side for the DDX response. But I'd rather parse JSON than XML
from Javascript, so I will probably keep using the JSON response for
my own projects where I control both the client and the server.

--Rob