JSON ... it's the intersection of all modern programming languages. All languages have some sense of data, and structures of data. They all have simple values like number strings, and booleans. They all have some sense of a sequence of values. ... Every language has some sense of a collection of named values; it might be an object, or a record, or a struct, or a hash, or a property list, or something. All languages have these, these are universal ideas.

... But they all have the same idea about what the data looks like, and JSON has the thing that's common to everything. By being at the intersection, it turns out to be the thing that everybody can agree on, so it's really easy to pass data back and forth.

Prior data interchange formats tended to try to be the union of all the languages, and that turns out to be horrendously complex, and very difficult to deal with. JSON, by being so simple, actually became really easy to use.

...
m301:{l:"m301.html", t:"Module Definition"},
m302:{l:"m302.html", t:"Layout Definition"},
m303:{l:"m303.html", t:"Column Width Definition", c:"green"},
...

• m301 - the module ID
• l - short for link, defines the url of this module
• t - short for title, defines the title of the module when loaded
• c - short for color, defines the color theme of the module, now "red", "orange", "green", "yellow", "white" are supported with blue as default.

• via http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/07/10-interesting-lightweight-jquery.html
• via http://mshook.appspot.com/z/d4m.htm?/popular/jquery

Introducing Bitlash

Bitlash is an open source interpreted language shell for the Arduino serial port. It runs on the Arduino and interprets commands that you type in a terminal window or send programmatically:

Bitlash is a development and prototyping tool for those situations where you need to bang some bits on the Arduino but writing a sketch in C is premature. The Bitlash command language is very similar to Arduino C and includes a large repertiore of the familiar Arduino C functions so you can hack your hardware from the serial command line or even over the internet via telnet.

June 13th, 2009

FLOSS Weekly 73: Tim O'Reilly

Hosts: Randal Schwartz, Jono Bacon, and Leo Laporte

Tim O'Reilly talks about open source and the future of web technologies.

Guest: Tim O'Reilly.

Tim O'Reillyis the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. He works to spread knowledge on past, present, and future technologies though his company. Beyond publishing is recognized as a leading visionary for future technology trends. He is an advocate of open source, open standards, and is pushing for intellectual property reform.