Introducing JSON

So far, we talked about REST APIs, the resources that we manage through REST APIs, and the verbs using which we typically manage the resources. But the point is whenever we talk to a resource, we either gather some information about it or do something on it by passing some information to the handling method. Obviously, data passing between a client and server is the main objective. We discussed how we can pass data between client and server, but how do we ensure that the client and server understand each other, the data returned by server is in the same format that the client is expecting, or vice versa? As mentioned earlier, different types of data format are supported since REST is not a protocol. It depends on the protocol that you are using. If the protocol supports a data format, REST can work with it. Two of the frequently used formats are JSON and XML. Because of its simplicity, JSON has become very popular as the format of choice in RESTful services.

JSON (short...