Introduction
More and more JSON is becoming the data interchange format of the web and even starts to leak outside of this world, replacing XML wherever it can, and there is really good reasons for that.
But often people are driven towards JSON for other reasons, not necessarily bad reasons, but based on more anecdotal facts, like the so-called verbosity of XML.
Indeed this is the argument you’ll hear the most often, e.g. just have a look at this nice comparison of the two formats: the first cons is of course “verbosity“.
And it’s a factual argument: the size gains can be important if your values are small, typically for representing business objects like customers because the markup overhead (all the closing tags) will become important relatively to the carried information (e.g. the names and zip codes of your customers).
But you rarely send big chunk of data in a raw text format as XML or JSON, because nowadays servers and clients (e.g. web browsers) supports live gzipping of the workloads, and use it transparently.
So the size advantage of JSON over XML should reduce because GZIP knows how to factorize redundant information like markups.
At least this seems a reasonable speculation, but while intuition is good hard numbers are better to be definitely convinced and to have a numerical idea of the impact.
So I’ve written a small Java benchmark that I’ll present, along with its results, in this article.