11. Objects and Portable Data: XML and JSON

Object-oriented technologies have made significant inroads in the past decade. Objects have become one of the primary technologies in the application development industry. Objects have also made major headway in the definition and movement of data. Much excitement has been generated over the past several years regarding the portability of code. For example, much of Java’s success is due to the fact that it is highly portable across multiple platforms.

The bytecodes produced by Java can be executed on various platforms, as long as the system has a Java virtual machine loaded. The .NET framework provides another, very important, type of portability—portability across various languages. The assemblies produced by C# .NET can be used within Visual Basic .NET applications, or any other .NET language for that matter. Certainly, although many technology standards are in place, the major programming languages (Java, .NET, Objective-C, etc.) are still proprietary. Perhaps the future will bring a programming language that will be fully and economically portable across both languages and platforms.

Although portable languages are powerful tools, they are really only half of the application development equation. The programs that are written using these languages must process data, and this data must be turned into information. It is this information that drives businesses. Information is the other half of the portability equation.

XML is a standard mechanism for defining and transporting data between potentially disparate systems (JSON is another available option). By using object-oriented languages such as Java, VB, and C# in conjunction with an object-oriented data definition language such as XML and JSON, moving data between various destinations is much more efficient and secure. XML and JSON provide a mechanism for independent applications to share data.