JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 27, 2016 19:42 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: JMAP — reinventing IMAP by smurf
Parent article: JMAP — reinventing IMAP

> If you ever saw a nested multi-page JSON dump without any formatting whatsoever, and needed to start count braces to make heads or tails of it, you'll know what I mean.

Why wouldn't you install JSON Formatter and then click on arrows to navigate?

JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 27, 2016 20:05 UTC (Sun) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

If you need to do that then why aren't you using a binary protocol and a parser / dissector?

JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 28, 2016 4:26 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Because that's a much bigger pain in the ass of course, even for trivially small data.

JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 28, 2016 7:19 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

Because writing a JSON browser plugin for Wireshark is something nobody has done yet, and copying/pasting huge hunks of JSON between it and some program or browser window is about as annoying as squinting at squiggles.

IMHO, encoding some data into a protocol should be a function in the mathematical sense, i.e. any possible payload shall encode to exactly one datagram. JSON lets you play way too many games with whitespace, escaping and whatnot for that to be realistic.

And yes, computers are fast enough to eat JSON at mind-boggling speed these days, but if messagepack or smile or … can do the exact same thing with even less work (and no ambiguity), why not use that?

JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 28, 2016 7:32 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Because writing a JSON browser plugin for Wireshark is something nobody has done yet
Uhm. Wireshark supports JSON out of box. Try it.

> And yes, computers are fast enough to eat JSON at mind-boggling speed these days, but if messagepack or smile or … can do the exact same thing with even less work (and no ambiguity), why not use that?
Because once it breaks (and it WILL break, no doubt about it) debugging the breakage will be a nightmare.

Everything, and I mean it, EVERYTHING, in software should be designed with the assumption: "What is going to happen _when_ it breaks?"

JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 28, 2016 7:59 UTC (Mon) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> Uhm. Wireshark supports JSON out of box. Try it.

I can't see how this is at all relevant for JMAP. JMAP is currently only defined over HTTPS, and until wireshark can see inside TLS, it doesn't really matter if it can decode the JSON or not.

JMAP — reinventing IMAP

Posted Mar 28, 2016 8:01 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Wireshark can see inside TLS: https://wiki.wireshark.org/SSL