[apps-discuss] JSON Patch: jsondiff and syntax

[Martin Algesten <[e-mail]>]

(Sorry Paul C. Bryan, I'm stalking you from list to list. ;)

This is in reference to a discussion from a couple of days back 
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg03884.html

Parallel to Paul's work I've dreamt up another JSON patch syntax and implemented a diff/patch tool here:

https://github.com/algesten/jsondiff#readme

I don't agree that the verbosity of the JSON Patch RFC (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pbryan-json-patch-04) is okay.

I believe one of the big reasons that JSON has gained such popularity over say XML, is the simplicity of it. The simplicity is gained by a loss of semantics or perhaps better call it "inferred" semantics. Such inference are even more obvious in other terse data exchange formats such as YAML.

JSON Patch goes against this by having very explicit verbs "add", "replace", "move" etc. I don't buy the argument that using gzip transfer encoding solves this. XML compresses amazingly well, but I rather see that as an argument that something is wrong in the format to start off with.

I also think about things like "diff -u" where the '+/-' becomes second nature and the patches are very readable. Currently a JSON Patch file is an instruction list of mutations - almost like a programming language, which for me is different to a diff. But then I'm clearly biased :)

Cheers,
Martin