JSON meets JKstat and KAR

I've been looking at JSON for a long time, wondering whether and how to best make use of it. After considerable experimentation, I'm convinced, and it's going to be an integral part of both JKstat and KAR.

So, the first thing I was looking at was the client-server code in JKstat. One of the things that's always irritated me about XML-RPC is it's obvious lack of a long data type. It doesn't seem to be bothered that the world is more than 32-bits. Sure, there are various vendor extensions (and I have to turn them on in the Apache XML-RPC implementation that I use) but the result is something that's horribly non-portable.

The other thing I've been looking at is the archive format used in KAR. I started out with simple kstat -p but that proved inadequate in that important data (metadata) was missing, so I developed a private format. This was better, but was a horrid hack.

So, enter JSON. It turns out that it makes an excellent serialization format for kstats.

• Reusing a standard means there's less work for me to do.
• I can use the same code for KAR and the JKstat client-server mode.
• There are JSON bindings in almost all languages, so interoperability is easy to achieve.
• The format is a string, so no messing about with extensions to pass longs.
• For KAR, it's almost twice as quick to parse as my own hacked format.

As a result, the next versions of JKstat and KAR will support JSON as their archive and interchange format.

As an aside, this opens the door to wicked cool stuff.