Google announced its release of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) this week. The cool thing is that it allows writing AJAX stuff in Java and it’ll compile it to Javascript. And it’s completely free! Diving a little deeper, it is primarily designed to communicate to a J2EE backend through RPC. This was a little disappointing since I’m using PHP as my backend. Then while browing the developer forum, I discovered there is a way to communicate to a non-Java backend by using JSON. The post points out to some example code on how to do this.
I’ve never heard of JSON before, so I looked into that. It stands for JavaScript Object Notation. And it’s basically the Javascript notation of data (examples), so it’s easy for js to parse it.
PHP has several JSON libraries. But, I might try out JSON-PHP since it’s part of the pear repository.
More stuff:
JSON for the masses
Douglas Crockford
JSON and Yahoo!’s JavaScript APIs
Using JSON with Yahoo! Web Services
Wikipedia