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Comment by SolarUpNote | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a JSON based website layout and component system.

For example: a component that lists blog posts could be represented by:

  {
    options:{
      elements:[image, title, author, date]
    },
    criteria:{
      sort:date.desc, 
      published:true, 
      limit:10
    },
    request_vars:{page:3}
  }

That would show the last 10 posts that are published, ordered by date, on page 3 of the results.

That's a simple example, this site: volumeone.org is built almost entirely this way.

Since it's in JSON format, JavaScript can be used to build UIs that build the components and layouts.

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I might suggest using YAML too, either as an alternative or as a complete replacement. YAML (when written in a certain way) is basically JSON without any line noise, and optimized for human reading and writing. You will be able to parse it exactly the same.

I tried that too, but sometimes the nesting level is too deep for YAML. There were also some difficulties when escaping special characters in YAML.

In regards to the nesting level: what do you mean? There shouldn't be any technical limit on the nesting depth.

As for escaping special characters: I've run into that a lot, and I agree it is very annoying. God help you if you want to specify regexes on lines.

So for a lot of my YAML-ish applications, where YAML is used for user templating or configuration, I run everything through a really simple postprocessor (often by encapsulating non-digit lines with single quotes, and a few other tweaks) and that seems to work well for me. That way the user only has to type the bare minimum (no double quotes, no curly braces, no/fewer commas), and what they write "just works."

Your example is a JavaScript array, not a JSON object. Just saying.

How do you implement it in browser?

It's server-side. There's a record for each page/component in a database where the JSON is stored. It converts the "criteria" part into SQL, and the "options" part into HTML, and returns the resulting HTML for each component.

Might I suggest something like redis* for storing this data? Or is that what you mean by database?

* http://redis.io/

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been meaning to try that out, maybe it's time to look into Redis.

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