BenHollis.net

Just slightly ahead of the release of Firefox 8, JSONView 0.7 has been approved on the Mozilla Add-ons site. Firefox 8 actually handles JSON documents in the browser for the first time, reducing the need for extensions like JSONView - now, a vanilla Firefox will display JSON as plain text instead of prompting a download of the document. Still, JSONView provides much more than what's built in, and it will continue to be compatible with Firefox going forward (and it's still compatible with older versions all the way back to version 3.0). If you're on a modern version of Firefox you've probably already updated, and if not, you'll get the new version when you upgrade.

Last week I released JSONView 0.6 to addons.mozilla.org. This is mostly a bugfix release, but I honestly don't want to change much about such a simple addon. With over 60,000 daily users at this point, I feel that updates should be infrequent and unobtrusive. I do plan for some big new features for JSONView 1.0, but for now I'm mostly keeping the extension working with newer Firefoxes and fixing bugs that affect existing features. That said, one big change since the last version is that the source code is now on GitHub. I'm hoping this makes it easier for other developers to contribute, so please send pull requests! I'll probably move the issues list over to GitHub as well at some point, but for now they're still over at Google Code.

JSONView 0.4 was just approved on addons.mozilla.org. This one is mostly a bugfix release from 0.3, but I couldn't let it go out without one new feature, so I finally added support for content negotation. This means that you can go to the new JSONView options dialog (in the Addons menu) and enable sending the “application/json” content type with your HTTP Accept header. Some applications (like some Ruby on Rails websites) are set up to return JSON if you ask for it via the HTTP Accept header, and XML or HTML otherwise. This means thay you can now specify a preference for JSON, which should help when you're in that situation. I specifically made sure it works with CouchDB, which is an exiting document-based database with a JSON API. Before this option, CouchDB would return plain text to browsers, but now you can make it send JSON that'll be nicely formatted by JSONView. Note that the option to modify the HTTP Accept header isn't on by default because many people won't need it, and it has the potential to screw up some websites that don't expect browsers to ask for JSON. That said, I'm sure this will be helpful in a bunch of situations.

I've finally gotten around to doing some maintenance updates on three of my most-used bits of software (JSONView, XBList, and TopProcess), all in the last couple weeks. Now that they're all approved and live, I thought I'd summarize what's changed.

Just a quick update on JSONView - I've submitted version 0.2 to addons.mozilla.org. This new version doesn't have a lot of changes, but it adds some new translations (Hungarian, Bulgarian, German, and some Turkish), and you can now open “.json” files saved on your computer, enabling offline JSON viewing. This new version is also compatible with the latest Firefox 3.5 betas.

Today I uploaded a new version of JSONView to addons.mozilla.org. I'm sticking with the wimpy version number for now, but I think JSONView has been proving itself out in the wild. One major bug was uncovered that caused JSON documents larger than 8KB to render incorrectly, and that's fixed in this new version. I've also added three new translations of the extension (French, Dutch, and Czech) courtesy of the folks at BabelZilla.org - if you want to help out you can check out the available translations and add yours. Lastly, the extension is now compatible with Firefox 3.1b3. I've been trying to keep things tested on the beta browsers within a day or two of their release. If you have an older version of the extension you'll need to go back to AMO and install it again - automatic updates won't work until JSONView is out of the sandbox.

I'm a big fan of JSON as a data exchange format. It's simple, lightweight, easy to produce and easy to consume. However, JSON hasn't quite caught up to XML in terms of tool support. For example, if you try to visit a URL that produces JSON (using the official “application/json” MIME type), Firefox will prompt you to download the file. If you try the same thing with an XML document, it'll display a nice formatted result with collapsible sections. I've always wanted a Firefox extension that would give JSON the same treatment that comes built-in for XML, and after searching for it for a while I just gave up and wrote my own. The JSONView extension (install) will parse a JSON document and display something prettier, with syntax highlighting, collapsible arrays and objects, and nice readable formatting. In the case that your JSON isn't really JSON (JSONView is pretty strict) it'll display an error but still show you the text of your document. If you want to see the original text at any time, it's still available in “View Source” too.