JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript programming language. JSON's popularity is directly related to XML getting unpopular. XML was a great solution to provide a structure to the data in plain text format. With time, XML documents became heavier, and the overhead was not worth it.

JSON solved this problem by providing a structure with minimal overhead. Some people call JSON fat-free XML.

JSON's syntax follows these rules:

• Data is in the form of key-value pairs:

        "firstName" : "Bill"

• There are four datatypes in JSON:
  • String ("firstName" : "Barack")
  • Number ("age" : 56)
  • Boolean ("alive": true)
  • null ("manager" : null)
• Data is delimited by commas
• Curly braces {} represents an object:

        { "firstName" : "Bill", "lastName": "Clinton", "age": 70 }

• Square brackets [] represent an array:

        [{ "firstName" : "Bill", "lastName": "Clinton", "age": 70 }
          {"firstName": "Barack","lastName": "Obama", "age": 55}]

In this recipe, we will explore how to save and load data in the JSON format.