Data Interchange Format

XML vs JSON

• JSON is Java Script Object Notation
• XML is eXtensible Markup Language.

XML markup uses up more space than the actual payload. JSON has adressed this problem and while it's still a self-describing plain-text format, it's more space-efficient than anything XML-based could ever be.

JSON and Python

http://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html

JSON Translations

JSON	Python
object	dict
array	list
string	unicode
number (int)	int, long
number (real)	float
true	True
false	False
null	None

Python	JSON
dict	object
list, tuple	array
str, unicode	string
int, long, float	number
True	true
False	false
None	null