A Badass Way to Connect Programs Together
I think OSC is interesting, but Armstrong goes too far in his disparagement of XML and JSON:<p>&gt; I think it is totally crazy to send JSON or XML “over the air” since this will degrade the performance of the applications giving a bad user experience and higher bills - since ultimately we pay for every bit of data.<p>If every JSON and XML API switched to OSC, the difference in data usage would scarcely be measurable. First: The vast majority of mobile data is video, audio, images, and application updates. Second: When sent over the wire, JSON and XML are typically compressed with gzip or deflate.<p>And let&#x27;s not forget: JSON and XML have some significant advantages over most other serialization formats. They&#x27;re ubiquitous. Practically every programming language has libraries to parse and generate them. Practically every programmer knows how to work with them. They&#x27;re human-readable. No special programs are needed to view their contents.<p>In other words, JSON and XML are only &quot;wasteful&quot; if you don&#x27;t count developer time. Once you do, it suddenly makes a lot of sense to &quot;waste&quot; hardware resources. After all, programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap.