[mtrimpe]

I don't understand why JSON schemas and the OJMs (Object-JSON-Mappers ;) it would enable aren't being developed more heavily.

I love JSON, but when working on APIs between large companies / departments the "we'll just send JSON like this and email you when we change stuff" really won't cut it.

[mahmoudimus]

Let me state that for the record, I believe JSON is a fantastic data interchange format, especially when compared with the current state of XML.

However, the point you've touched on is exactly my gripe with JSON. I just might not know enough, which is completely adequate, but afaik all the JSON schemas are either extremely complicated (I'm looking at you json-schema) or way too simple (jschema).

When working with service oriented architectures and if you're following the principles of RESTful architecture, discoverability and HATEOAS become central to your service. That means that the API needs to be self-documenting.

How does one do this with JSON? Essentially, if you boil the problem down, what someone would try to accomplish is "marking up" their JSON responses/requests. The irony is hilarious because this is exactly the job that XML was designed for.

It's obvious that the XML ecosystem grew way of control exogenously, but the core concept was very simple and was designed to solve this exact problem which I think the JSON ecosystem currently lacks.

[lmm]

HATEOAS, discoverable apis, and the overengineered gunk that has today hijacked the name of REST (ironic, when much of the point of the original REST was to be not SOAP) remain pipe dreams. You can't write an API that clients that don't know your API can use, and I suspect it will take at least a hundred years until that becomes possible.

Certainly XML schema doesn't let you accomplish this. All I've ever seen it accomplish is telling you that a document doesn't conform to the schema, functionality that you can trivially achieve in JSON any number of ways (e.g. an API version field in the data).

There's no point trying to write a schema system without a use case that it can solve, and I've never seen such a thing.

[lgierth]

http://json-ld.org/

> JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data) is a lightweight Linked Data format that gives your data context. It is easy for humans to read and write

[AdrianRossouw]

with json-schema, the instance objects would have a $schema property referring to the schema of the document.

the schema has a links section, where you can define all the various related paths to use.

a 'suitably intelligent validator' should be able to resolve the links for you.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zyp-json-schema-03#section-...