JSON creator Douglas Crockford presented an overview of JSON--what he calls a "lightweight data interchange format"--at the Real-World Ajax Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. Crockford said that an advantage of the dot-com bust years is that "since nothing was going on" in the industry, the browsers actually became much more stable pieces of software, to the advantage of developers and users.

He said that the current resurgence of activity in the technology sector and software development world will likely lead to future instability, even new companies offering browsers to a market that is currently focused mostly on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

These concerns aside, Crockford said in his presentation that he is working with the major browser developers to integrate a JSON Request functionality into them. He said that talks with Microsoft have gone well so far, but that there has been some initial pushback from Mozilla regarding Firefox, "as they want to be sure they are very open about being inclusive of all ideas and not locking themselves into any one way of doing things," he noted.

Crockford said that he developed JSON, which stands for Javascript Object Notation, several years ago at the height of the dot-com boom, but saw the boom end just as it was ready to be sent to market. According to a website he's developed for JSON (found at www.json.org), "JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. "

JSON was written to be an alternative to XML (the X in Ajax), and Crockford's aim is to keep it simple, although is not necessarily diametrically opposed to it. Today there are still many applications with both XML code and JSON code in them. Furthermore, JSON does not require JavaScript to be present for it to work. To encourage its widespread use within the developer community, JSON supports most front-end and back-end languages in use in web services and Ajax development today, including ActionScript, C, C#, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, E, Java, JavaScript, Lua, ML, Objective CAML, Perl, PHP, Python, Rebol, and Ruby.