> We've had "win.ini" config file formats for years in the testing group
> and they are a PITA for anything other than simple configurations.
> Arrays and complex structures are ridiculous in the "win.ini" format
Agreed. If there is a decent candidate for simpler
it is IMNSHO JSON. Well documented, has standard,
easy to read. There are parsers available in just
about any language you can think of. See
http://json.org/
I was wondering when someone would bring up JSON. I have to give a big +1
to JSON over XML or anything else. I've been using JSON over the past
several months on a project here at work for exchanging data between various
software components written in different languages. I really appreciate the
(relatively) "lightweightedness" of JSON over XML. It makes for something
that is very readable which I've come to appreciate when debugging. The
json.org example page (http://www.json.org/example.html) is interesting in
that it compares JSON messages with their XML equivalents.
Specifically, I have several Python scripts that are able to encode/decode
JSON very easily since the JSON specification itself is essentially parsable
Python. It's pretty cool to be able to read in some data and directly use
it in the same manner, without any significant conversion. I haven't used
it myself yet but I understand the json-c library is very easy to use. I
understand it does reference counting so you only have to free the top node
and everything else underneath is freed up for you. Not sure about data
access there though but I'm guessing it is much easier than using some XML
parser. There are also a number of JSON encoders/decoders available for
Java.
-Jon
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