Can’t help myself…

So, I’ve been developing this jQuery chat thing, and it’s been teaching me so much about efficient data transfer and good API design. I have to say that I am by no means a David Walsh or an Aaron Newton, but I want to show you what I came up with after a few days of jQuery AJAX chat and a few hours of MooTools AJAX chat…

One of the most important questions you can ask, when developing something that is going to do a lot of data transfer (very quickly), is what data/information format you are going to use. As I see it; there are 3 widely available options when working with Javascript: CSV, XML and JSON. CSV is a simple format but what do you use as column/row delimiters? What if the data includes tabs or new lines? Bummer! Next up is XML. XML is horrible. Next up is JSON; this is probably the most widely used data format in Javascript. It’s concise and simple to do with both Javascript/PHP.

There are problems with JSON though – it requires a third-party library to parse it (from string to object, PHP -> Javascript) in Javascript, or eval (evil). It also requires a third-party library in PHP to parse from/to JSON. So it’s a good format, but there are problems.

It is possible to use characters that users can’t input (control characters) – which are similar to \t and \n – to delimit CSV data. You can also do this in PHP and the only methods required in both Javascript/PHP are string split/join.