BrockLi Soup

John first mentioned JSON about a month ago, but at the time I had no inclination to look into it and find out if it was something I could use. It came across my radar again today thanks to a Particle Tree article that I never finished reading, but that’s not important. The long and short of it is that JSON is really just a fancy name for eval-ing JavaScript objects - one of those “why didn’t I think of that” kinds of things.

The few times I’ve tried using Ajax, I’ve spent most of my time fighting with XML parsing (or convincing IE that it was XML I was trying to parse), so the allure of native JavaScript objects was enticing. I talked with one of the guys at work about writing a function in PHP that would take an array and generate the appropriate code, until I came across the (seemingly de facto) “official” JSON page. He’s got references there for pretty much every language you’d expect to do web development in (and a few you wouldn’t) - including JSON-PHP, which does exactly what I was going to. Couple that with Prototype’s quick-and-dirty Ajax.Request, and you’ve got a Web 2.0 application quicker than you can say “What the hell is a Web 2.0 application?”

QuirksBlog has a pretty good post comparing JSON, XML, and HTML snippets, if you’d like to further consider your Ajaxing options.

It’s been a good week. I spent Monday and Tuesday catching up on the sleep I missed last weekend. Yesterday, I did the final test for Chem, so that’s not hanging over my head any more. We had a handful of people over last night for a shindig, which was a lot of fun. Earlier this week, I bought a TiVo - I figure I’m going to have to get my own apartment soon enough, and that’s one of the few appliances I want. This guy here at RIT was selling it with the lifetime subscription (usually $299) for $175, so I couldn’t pass it up.

Today, I’ve just been reading. I feel like I should be working on something, but there’s really nothing that needs doing. I still want to do something with AJAX, and I’ve got a couple projects in various unfinished states, but I think I’d like to catch up on some reading before I jump back into programming. I just haven’t felt like doing it lately. It’s unfortunate, because I really should be polishing up some projects from the past few years and putting together a portfolio, but I just can’t get into it.

Oh well. I have lots to read and watch. I can program later.

…you spend more time thinking about blogging and AJAX then sex.