[Seaside] Seaside2.5b8-tonyg.9 + JSON

[Tony Garnock-Jones]

Hi Brent,

Brent Pinkney wrote:
> Could you advise whether your JSON thingie can serialize arbitrary
> object  graphs and merterialise them in the browser. I recall the ILS
> project  enhances the JSON grammar to do this.

No, it currently only serialises:

  Dictionary
  Boolean
  Number
  SequenceableCollection
  String
  UndefinedObject

via an extension method #jsonWriteOn:.

I've just had a google for "ils json", and it looks to me like they're
reinventing UBF(A)'s notion of a tagged datum, and possibly also placing
a specific interpretation on the tag. (See
http://www.sics.se/~joe/ubf/site/home.html for details of UBF.)

I guess you could achieve a similar effect by choosing an encoding for
your objects and then implementing #jsonWriteOn: for each class you want
to encode. Reading encoded objects back might be tricky; an interpreter
for JSON data-structures would probably be required. It seems
out-of-scope for the JSON level, in the same way as SIXX is out-of-scope
for YAXO. Perhaps SIXX could be targeted at JSON?

(By the way, the JSON code is now available via squeakmap and
http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/sm/package/d38bdc2d-e52a-4167-ae73-2cf438c65c2f)

Regards,
  Tony