Category Archives: Musings

The technology war

I recently attended some Google demo days and two interesting little facts were buried in the piles of other data.

JSON versus XML

Seems that Google is changing many of its APIs to no longer return data in XML fragments but to use JSON (Javascript Object Notation) to exchange data. Google claims its about 34% lighter in terms of bytes served to return JSON results than XML.

SOAP versus REST

Another technology change seems to be the large-scale move to prefer REST (Representational State Transfer) rather than SOAP for web services. I wasn’t aware there was a huge debate here. But looking online afterwards, there are endless flamewars, logs etc about this. But in a nutshell, if you don’t know about REST then its time to climb on the wagon as the Google machine is now all about REST architectures.