Open-source, JavaScript JSON HTML viewer released | Hacker News Reader

Open-source, JavaScript JSON HTML viewer released

ajaxstack.com

116 pointsmythz22 comments

When I first started interacting with APIs that use JSON I wanted a JS library to automatically convert a JSON structure into, hopefully semantically correct, HTML which I could then easily style with CSS. At the time I couldn't find anything but I did write a simple piece of JS. I show an example of how I used it to style tweets on my site: http://nirmalpatel.com/json2posh/

Another Javascript-driven JSON viewer (that also allows editing):

http://www.thomasfrank.se/json_editor.html

My go-to JSON viewer: http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/

Very nice. I am writing a couchapp and think this will work nicely as a report-generator. Thanks!

You're welcome :)

I like http://jsbeautifier.org/

that is different thing altogether. You are comparing apples and Oranges.

How is this different from all the javascript template engines like ejs[1], jQuery.tmpl(), jQuote2[2] or one of the many others?

[1]http://embeddedjs.com/

[2]http://aefxx.com/jquery-plugins/jqote2/

edit: Now I understand. This one generates the report automagically, no need to create a HTML template for the JSON data.

Yeah, it's just a way to better visualize your JSON data so it becomes more readable in a glance.

Is there a JSON microformat for marking strings as URLs which the user agent should be able to follow? 'Cos that's all that's missing from making this sort of thing a generic REST client.

I think it's rare to see JSON HyperMedia data formats in the wild, XML seems the preferred choice due to its use of attributes for metadata annotation.

Here's on of the few examples I've found that uses JSON: http://restafari.blogspot.com/2010/10/evolving-hal.html

Although I dislike the use of XML in Ajax/SPA applications and very much side with Douglas Crockford in the JSON vs XML debate :) http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source

Perhaps you could do some simple detection if a given field is a url (i.e., using a regexp) and auto-link it in the generated reports?

That won't work reliably with relative links. It also lacks any kind of link annotation (so, is this linked resource a "parent"? A "child"? Metadata? And so on).

There's also this: http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/json which looks interesting enough to bookmark.

There is a bug while parsing http://reddit.com/.json It is unable to render it.

I couldn't even get it to accept:

{"OH HAI":[{"foo":42, "bar":123}, {"foo":123, "bar":456}]}

This:

    {"foo":42, "bar",123}

isn't even a valid JSON object. If you make it valid JSON and replace the comma in this with a colon, it accepts it.

That was an HN typo, as I had already closed the window where I typed the JSON.

Ok, fixed a null ref bug. http://reddit.com/.json now works, just a little ugly

I've used/loved http://chris.photobooks.com/json/default.htm since the beginning of time for debugging. It isn't embeddable, though I find that it's more readable.

Awesome piece of work! I am definitely gonna use this when i get a chance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com