Update​

This post originally started out as an explanation of JSON. However as I wrote this quickly got abandoned in favour of writing about how I came to use JSON in the first place - which was through the use of Ajax. Having written a goodly amount I've now decided to move the actual JSON stuff into another post since I think Ajax is probably worth thinking about by itself rather than as an aside. So let me start at the beginning and explain how I came to use Ajax in the first place (this may take some time so please bear with me). In late 2004 I first started working on a project which I was to remain involved with (on and off) for a very long time indeed. The project was part financial reporting system and part sales incentivisation tool; it was used internally in the investment bank in which I was working. The project had been in existence for a number of years and had a web front end which at that point would been built in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, classic ASP and with a Visual Basic 6.0 back end. One of the reasons I had been brought on to the project was to help ".Net-ify" the thing and migrate it to ASP.NET and C#. I digress. The interesting thing about this app was that there were actually some quite advanced things being done with it (despite the classic ASP / VB). The users could enter trades into the system which represented actual trades that had been entered into a trading system elsewhere in the organisation. These trades would be assigned a reporting value which would be based on their various attributes. (Stay with me people this will get more interesting I *promise*.) The calculation of the reporting value was quite an in depth process and needed to be performed server-side. However, the users had decreed that it wasn't acceptable to do a full postback to the server to perform this calculation; they wanted it done "on-the-fly". Now if you asked me at the time I'd have said "can't be done". Fortunately the other people working on the project then weren't nearly so defeatist. Instead they went away and found Microsoft's webservice.htc library. For those of you that don't know this was a JavaScript library that Microsoft came up with to enable the access of Web Services on the client. Given that it was designed to work with IE 5 I suspect it was created between 1999-2001 (but I'm not certain about that). Now it came as a revelation to me but this was a JavaScript library that talked to our web services through the medium of XML. In short it was my first encounter with anything remotely Ajax-y. It was exciting! However, the possibilities of what we could do didn't actually become apparent to me for some years. It's worth saying that the way we were using webservice.htc was exceedingly simplistic and rather than investigating further I took the limited ways we were using it as indications of the limitations of Ajax and / or webservice.htc. So for a long time I thought the following: - The only way to pass multiple arguments to a web service was to package up arguments into a single string with delimiters which you could split and unpackage as your first step on the server.

So it's 2010 and I've started using jQuery. jQuery is a JavaScript library. This means that I'm writing JavaScript... Gulp! I should say that at this point in time I hated JavaScript (I have mentioned this previously). But what I know now is that I barely understood the language at all. All the JavaScript I knew was the result of copying and pasting after I'd hit "view source". I don't feel too bad about this - not because my ignorance was laudable but because I certainly wasn't alone in this. It seems that up until recently hardly anyone knew anything about JavaScript. It puzzles me now that I thought this was okay. I suppose like many people I didn't think JavaScript was capable of much and hence felt time spent researching it would be wasted. Just to illustrate where I was then, here is 2009 John's idea of some pretty "advanced" JavaScript:

What on earth is jQuery? What's a jQuery plugin?

The year was 2010 (not really that long ago I know) and the project that I was working on was sorely in need of a new grid component. It was an ASP.NET WebForms project and for some time we'd been using what was essentially a glorified datagrid which had a few extra features implemented to allow us to change column order / columns displayed / copy contents to clipboard etc. Our grid worked perfectly fine - it gave us the functionality we needed. However, it looked pretty terrible, and had some "quirky" approaches in place for supporting IE and Firefox side by side. Also, at the time we were attempting to make our app seem new and exciting again for the users. The surprising truth is that users seem to be more impressed with a visual revamp than with new or amended functionality. So I was looking for something which would make them sit up and say "oooh - isn't it pretty!". Unfortunately the nature of the organisation I was working for was not one that lended itself to paying for components. They were occasionally willing to do that but the hoops that would have to be jumped through first, the forms that would need to be signed in triplicate by people that had nearly nothing to do with the project made that an unattractive prospect. So I began my search initially looking at the various open source offerings that were around. As a minimum I was looking for something that would do what our home-grown component did already (change column order / columns displayed / copy contents to clipboard etc) but hopefully in a "nicer" way. Also, I had long been unhappy with the fact that to get our current grid to render results we did a *full postback* to the server and re-rendered the whole page. Pointless! Why should you need to do all this each time when you only wanted to refresh the data? Instead I was thinking about using an Ajax approach; a grid that could just get the data that it needed and render it to the client. This seemed to me a vastly "cleaner" solution - why update a whole screen when you only want to update a small part of it? Why not save yourself the trouble of having to ensure that all other screen controls are persisted just as you'd like them after the postback? I also thought it was probably something that would scale better as it would massively reduce the amount of data moving backwards and forwards between client and server. No need for a full page life cycle on the server each time the grid refreshes. Just simple data travelling down the pipes of web. With the above criteria in mind I set out on my Google quest for a grid. Quite soon I found that there was a component out there which seemed to do all that I wanted and far more besides. It was called jqGrid:

It started with Scott Hanselman. I had no particular plans to start a blog at all. However, I was reading Scott Hanselman's turn of the year post and I was struck with an idea.