XML and JSON

Question

Can people comment on what types of machines tend to generate data with these extensions?

I am working on putting together a slide that shows the breadth of the types of data that you can bring into JMP…but I want to do it from the customers’ view.

Maybe this already exists somewhere and I just don’t know…

nascif_jmp · Answer

That is correct. You can have very different data pipelines, from a single machine in a lab with an embedded data collection process to hundreds of machines in a factory floor (or thousands in a city in an IoT scenario) that send events to a data collection process (which might even be on the cloud). The "last mile" process that writes down the collected data is the one that would determine the final format.

wendytseng · Answer

Thanks @nascif_jmp .  My question stems from wanting to link back the file types to actual pieces of equipment in the lab, mfg floor, etc. that would tend to generate these types of files.  Given what you described I guess I should rephrase my question as "Which applications tend to generate JSON and XML...and do people have specific experience with certain types of equipment that work with those applications."  It's hard to do a demo describing the benefits of JSON and XML import (to a broad audience) without tying it back to a piece of equipment, measurement system, etc.

nascif_jmp · Answer

@wendytseng I don't know what you mean by types of machines... perhaps you mean processes, or applications?

I would say that it will depend on the technology used to create the application that is collecting the data. Usually a developer will use a library to generate the output in one or the other format (generating "by hand" is possible but very error prone) so going one step further, the availability of said libraries is a factor.

XML is a few decades old by now and very verbose. It is likely to be generated by legacy applications written in languages such as C/C++ and Java. Which points to embedded servers, IoT, etc.

JSON is much more recent and a subset of JavaScript. It is found across modern web services and web applications. A server coded in JavaScript, Go or Python is much more likely to generate data in JSON.

Of course, these are just high-level guesses and you can certainly find IoT data in JSON and web services in XML.

PS: There is a new generation of formats coming up designed for speed, such as Apache Arrow (columnar data) and gRPC (binary encoding). Pretty soon we will be seeing customers asking about those as well.