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ion's tale

Finding beautiful 🧬 capabilities hidden in plain sight is thrilling 🚀 Realizing they've existed for decades is humbling 🙇🏾‍♂️ Sharing them is enlightening 🤲🏾

This is the story of ⚛️ ion: invoked object notation, one such capability's journey through time.

decades

One to discover, another to embrace.

1997

{✨:javascript}'s first language-specification is published 👏🏾

2007

Michael Lee is 🙇🏾‍♂️inspired🤲🏾 to share a capability within JavaScript he discovers & names jsonXD: json cross-domain 👨🏾‍💻

2017

Michael names & shares jsonXD's core concept & capabilities, ion: invoked object notation, and ionify: ion implemented for you 🎉

details

In 2003, Michael created ajile ♻️ asynchronous javascript importing & loading extension; a java-like module system for the web that enabled fetching javascript across different domains 🤓

Namespace ('my.space')
Import    ('needed.Thing')
ImportAs  ('useful.Thing', 'Thing2')

my.space.Module
= function Module ()
    { var thing1 = new Thing ()
        , thing2 = new Thing2()            /*
    | my module's remaining code goes here  */
    }

json

By 2007, JSON: javascript object notation, a javascript-compatible data-interchange alternative to XML, was rising in popularity. Michael recognized this, and was 🙇🏾‍♂️inspired🤲🏾 to enable cross-domain JSON acquisition & interaction via ajile 👨🏾‍💻

Unfortunately, ajile-fetched JSON was programmatically inaccessible, and its object-literal form generated syntax errors 😓

Load ('http://remo.te/data.json')

//         JSON response
{       "remote" : "request"
,     "responds" : "with this"
, "inaccessible" : "JSON which"
,    "generates" : "a Syntax Error"
,  "when loaded" : "as JavaScript"
}

At the time, cross-domain acquisition wasn’t possible via the popular but same-origin-policy-limited XMLHttpRequest resource-fetching web API 😔

jsonp

JSONP offered an alternative, but required wrapping JSON in a function call, or padding it with a variable or property assignment:

Load ('http://remo.te/data.jsonp?callback=on')

// JSONP response: function-wrapped
on ({        "remote" : "request"
    ,      "responds" : "with this"
    ,     "evaluated" : "JSON"
    ,   "passed as a" : "JavaScript Object"
    , "to a possibly" : "invalid on() function"
   })

Load ('http://remo.te/data.jsonp')

// JSONP response: variable-assignment-padded
var jsonp
  = {      "remote" : "request"
    ,    "responds" : "with this"
    ,   "evaluated" : "JSON"
    , "passed as a" : "JavaScript Object"
    , "stored as a" : "server-defined variable"
    }

This was close, but still invalid JSON syntax 🤔

discovery

Success came in 2007, when through diligent 👨🏾‍🏫 study of the JavaScript Language Specification, and object-literal syntax 👨🏾‍🔬 experimentation, Michael 👨🏾‍💻 discovered it was possible to interact with anonymous objects, like JSON, by invoking & observing numeric object-type conversion! 👌🏾

Object.prototype.valueOf   // 1: observe
= function onObject ()
    { this.json == "data"  // 3: interact
    }

~  {"json":"data"}         // 2: invoke & notify
~ ({"json":"data"})        // 2: invoke & notify via jsonp

A single-character prefix of ~, +, or - was key 🎉 and as close to observable & syntactically-correct JSON as we could get 👏🏾

This capability

  • obsoletes JSONP,
  • complements existing JSONP implementations with ~ and - as compatible, dependable & unobtrusive callbacks,
  • introduces a universe of applications beyond cross-domain JSON acquisition & interaction,
  • and exists within all JavaScript environments 🤓

development

After an additional two years of experimentation & implementation, Michael 🙋🏾‍♂️ publicly introduced this capability, at the 2009 Ajax Experience web developer conference, as a cross-domain JSON-fetching solution he named jsonXD: json cross-domain.

Over the next decade he continued to develop, explore, explain, present, extend & name

in 2015, 2016, 2017 @ /dev/color/ in motion, and 2020 @ devopsdays medellín 👨🏾‍💻

distribution

Today 💎 jems, ⚛︎ ion, 🧬 ionify, 🎁 ionified, 📖 stories & 📝 captions are jsonXD's progeny & the foundation of the many kinds of ions now available for implementation, discovery, extension, and study.

🙇🏾‍♂️ through * יהוה * impossible -is- nothing || 🇬🇾👨🏾‍💻🇺🇸 mike lee & team 🤲🏾