What is JSON?

JSON stands for "JavaScript Object Notation" and is pronounced "Jason" (like in the Friday the 13th movies). It's meant to be a human-readable and compact solution to represent a complex data structure and facilitate data-interchange between systems.

Why use JSON?

There are tons of reasons why you would want to use JSON:
It's human readable... if it's properly formatted :-P It's compact because it doesn't use a full markup structure, unlike XML It's easy to parse, especially in JavaScript A gazillion JSON libraries are available for most programming languages The data structure is easy to understand.