All applications work with data in some form. Sometimes the data can be retrieved from a database, like Oracle. But as we mentioned last time, Oracle is just one way to store data.
What if we need to share data with a system that doesn’t have access to query our Oracle database? Or what if we want to pull in data from a service like Coursedog that stores its data in a different format? Coursedog doesn’t want to give us direct access to their database. Nor do we want to grant direct access to our Oracle databases in many cases.
JSON solves that problem for us. It provides a way to maintain the structure of data in a technology-agnostic way. It’s a common format to easily send or retrieve data that can then be converted and inserted into whatever database solution you’re working with. It’s pretty intuitive as well.
{
"name": "John",
"age": 30,
"city": "New York"
}
In the example JSON above, you can pretty quickly intuit that this is data for someone named John, who is 30 years old and lives in New York.
We maintain a handful of APIs that provide JSON data including our Terms API, Sessions API, Academic Calendar API, and Course Fees API. All of those provide data that we use for integrations in systems like Drupal that can’t access our databases directly.
