There’s a lot of good things about JSON — it’s a standards based, language independent, representation of object-like data. Also, it’s easy to read (for users and programmers alike). Each document is only about data, not complex object graphs and links. Thus it’s easy to inspect without knowing all the code of an application.
Further, JSON is “schemaless”. We do not have to predefine our (protocol) schema. This can be quite helpful: imagine RPC’ing data from client A to server B with a fixed schema for the messages. On a schema change both need to be ‘updated’ with the new schema. If there are many components to the system it’s even more complicated of course. There is some analogy here to XML, which can (optionally) be schemaless.
It would be nice to have a binary representation of JSON. That is what BSON is all about.
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