tye introduced me to JSON via the CB some years ago. It has become the lingua franca here. Everything we transmit from one app to another is going either through a database (SQL) or JSON. XML exists, but only with third-party apps that we don't control, and, for the most part, we don't interact with them through their XML anyway. JSON has a simpler API for both encoding data and extracting data. And that simpler API is language-agnostic: join '', map { "Using JSON in $_ is easier than using XML in $_.\n" } qw( Perl Java JavaScript ActionScript ) And both are downright horrible in shell script. So we don't do that.

JSON also is less verbose. Which makes it better suited for tracing inputs/outputs in our trace files. (When objects are involved, it becomes a bit tricky, but XML serialisation has the same issue.) Our trace files grow fairly big fairly quickly already, keeping bloat down is always a win.