Parsing and visualising JSON

Over the last few days I've been working on a project that uses some fairly complex JSON objects. Because JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data interchange format, it can be a great way to grab complex data structures via Ajax. It's been said that JSON is "the fat-free alternative to XML".

In theory JSON is easy to parse, but if your data structure starts to contain numerous nested objects and arrays, it can be come hard to keep track of and starts looking like a long jumble of punctuation.

I found Brenton Fletcher's JSON 2 HTML to be a quick and easy way to check your JSON syntax and visualize the data. You can either copy+paste a JSON string or sumbit a URL and the will page load the JSON string from the URL. It's definitely worth checking out if you're working with JSON.