No matter how experienced you are in using a computer, there is no guarantee that you will never go through the nightmare of accidental data loss. Should you change your mind about a file you have just deleted, or simply realize that it was the wrong f…

Imagine something like an address book application. The user is presented with a form of some type where he/she can enter a name, email, phone number, etc… Have you ever stopped to consider just how it is this information is being stored inside the application? The answer is that it is stored inside what we call “data structures”. A data structure is a mathematical representation for storing and retrieving information from a computer’s memory. If you teach math then think discrete mathematics (i.e., graphs, trees, etc…).

Modern programming languages are “Object Oriented” meaning we group common tasks and the data they operate on into components. The reason this is desirable is for reusability. Once an object is created, it can be used over an over again in different applications. One fundamental problem in computer science is how to serialize an object. A computer’s memory is not necessarily sequential. We don’t just start laying data as if it were bricks. We take what’s available and often that means that data is scattered about in a non-linear fashion (thus the need for data structures).

What about when the user hits the “save” button? Our address book application needs to somehow convert this data it has in memory to something it can place on disk or transmit across the network; something sequential. We call this serialization and XML is well equipped for the task. The problem is that transforming the objects data to and from XML can be a bit daunting because the two are represented very differently.

JSON is a way of representing the objects data from the perspective of the programmer. In doing so, we simply tell the language compiler to “evaluate” the text. Any program begins with “code” and so any programming language compiler has to inherently “evaluate” some form of text we refer to as the “language” itself. In the case of Ajax, the language is Javascript. JSON stores the data inside its objects in a way that allows us to simply read it back in as if it were the original code.

From a programming perspective, this allows you ingest the data very easily and get to the goal of the matter which is performing operations on the data.

Retrieving data from a Javascript object is a simple process for anyone with basic programming skills. You don’t have to be a god (trust me, the gods are off doing much deeper things in the field of computer science) all you need is some basic knowledge which should be abundant on the Internet.

If programming really interests you, I suggest picking up a book on Python. It’s a very powerful language that is completely objected oriented and very easy to learn (as far as languages go). Knowing just a little Python would demystify Javascript and JSON and prove to be an extremely handy skill for anyone in your position.

Enjoyed your son’s scrapblog. He is a cutie pie.
Marsha in Palatka, Florida