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Comment by triathlete | Hacker News Reader

Mongodb is a json document store. I use it myself. It works very well with "node" because node of course uses javascript as its language.

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It's not JSON, it's BSON. BSON supports more data types, which are needed for a proper database (such as object IDs, longs, doubles, binary data, references, etc.)

You still need a driver and a bson serializer if you use node.js.

Sure. But it's certainly easier than most other languages. It's not a great reason to switch for that, but working with Mongo is fairly trivial in Node.

But wouldn't it work as equally well with any other language that has a JSON library? With Node you still need to call a function to serialize an object to a JSON string or vice versa.

Not any other language. In JavaScript there is 1 function call to serialize and 1 function call to deserialize. In Java it's much more complicated, for example.

Well in Java, if your JSON library doesn't have a single function to call for deserialize or serialize, it's either a poor library or you should be able to wrap the complicated part in a function that makes it a one-liner. The Jackson library for instance has ObjectMapper.readValue() and ObjectMapper.writeValue() which are both one-liners.

My main point though is that writing in JavaScript doesn't naturally make it easier to work with JSON than any other language with similar functions to serialize/deserialize JSON.

I'm not a Java coder so I'll take your word on it about library support, I've only used the JSONObject, JSONArray, etc. classes. Surely you will concede that JSON being modeled after JavaScript gives the language a little bit of a leg up?

Not really. In theory, it's an advantage in that you can reuse the parser and avoid loading another, but in practice, that's only really important in the browser, not on the server, where the lib will be permanently loaded anyway.

And JSON values map 1:1 to native data structures in most languages - in fact, JSON can be parsed as Python code with the exception of the \/ escape.

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