Skip to main content

JSON Information Management and Publishing for Technical and Business users

Like it or not JSON is the data format of the web at the moment. It has found uses in application configuration, taxonomy management and pretty much any domain that used to be handled by XML is now increasingly being taken over by JSON.

While our Hivemind product is first and foremost a web application delivery platform, it doubles as a full-blown Structured Information Manager and Publisher for JSON information. Both technical and non-technical users can use it to create and publish complex structured information without writing code.


Hivemind has a sophisticated Smart Object technology that can be used to create complex objects that are then serialized as JSON.

About Smart Objects

  • Smart Objects are an executable construct on the Hivemind platform, in executable form the file format is itself JSON. You can see an example of a Smart Object executable here: http://crudzilla.s3.amazonaws.com/ip-range.json
  • Smart Objects can invoke other Smart Objects in the way that any executable construct (eg. a php file) should be able to invoke another executable.
  • Smart objects can be invoked in code (eg. Groovy,Javascript,Closure,Ruby) and the resulting complex object is a composite made up of java Objects and ArrayLists.You can use them in your code just like any other object.
  • Smart Objects can be secured in a number of ways
    •   Fields can be marked as final to prevent browser supplied overrides
    •   They can be restricted to only be invoked by another smart object, in other words not invokable directly from the browser.
    •   You can apply role based security as in any Java application, you actually define roles using a smart object :)
  • Smart Objects are composed using the file system structure, in other words you can organize a filesystem folder structure that mirrors your structured information. This is very intuitive and makes it easy to think about your JSON information.

Smart Objects in action

Below is an example of a Smart Object setup for the AWS ip list (https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json). You can imagine that IP list could be maintained by anyone, they don't need to even know what JSON is.


1)A simple Smart Object representing an AWS IP


 2) Smart Object prefixes property invokes another Smart Object, thus leading to composition.


3)Secure a Smart Object

4) Test result from executing the Smart Object, it results in JSON.










Benefits

Developers can offload management of JSON information to business users: Often times developers rely on information that is managed by business users, or at least that should be managed by business or non-technical users. For instance a developer building an e-commerce site would need to get information from a product catalog. A developer may need some taxonomy managed by someone else who's non-technical. In order for developers to work together with non-technical users requires the non-technical user mocking about with complex JSON or XML files, increasing the risk of breaking applications when they make simple syntax mistakes.

Whether it is in the domain of retail, healthcare, manufacturing or technology, structure information is everywhere. Hivemind's Smart object technology can help you tame your JSON information.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hype on HackNews and Silicon Valley

One of the consequences of refusing to drink the in vogue kool-aid is that you remain sober and take in the full brunt of the silliness going on around you. The technology industry overflows with such silliness, like any credible geek I spend too much time reading HackerNews even when I don't want to. One odd phenomenon I have observed over the past few years is the fact that there is a rather peculiar writing style in Silicon Valley, seemingly meant to make writing more efficient in conveying hype. Specifically, the desire to create emphasis when otherwise the point being made is prosaic has lead people in Silicon Valley to come up with this odd writing style where adverbs are deployed in ways that no decent writer would. Let's just say a good chunk of "influencers" in SV suffer from Hype-Nitis . I have gleefully collected a small sample of these gems on HackerNews over the past couple of years: atrociously bad crucially important astonishingly successful

Reactive and Component Frameworks for "Old Fart" Programmers

One of the great challenges for experienced developers when confronted with new concepts is being able to map one's existing knowledge to the new concept. As they say, there is nothing new under the sun, that is often more true for new development methodologies. Even when new jargon is brought to bear on new methodologies, often upon closer inspection you recognize that it is something that you already know that is being described in a new way (unfortunately sometimes in a convoluted way to make it seem new). Reactive/Component UI/UX frameworks are one such development, while their particular implementations may be new and novel, almost all of the underlying concepts are not new. This is hardly a thorough presentation of Reactive/Component frameworks, but rather an attempt to fill in some gaps for developers who have experience but might find themselves confused by some of these new kids on the block. The top 3 reactive component frameworks being React, Angular and Vue. Al

The feds need to shutdown the bitcoin scam now.

I live in Baltimore, let's say I have some hypothetical friends who are always looking for a good hustle. Now imagine if my friends got together for a new get-rich-quick-scheme, the scheme is very simple. They invent something called cracken (bitcoins) that they start selling on a few blocks in Hamsterdam . The way you get crackens is to do laps around the blocks in Hamsterdam . Initially when the scheme was setup, you could get a whole lot of crackens by merely doing a few strolls around the block. Needless to say my friends made out like bandits, since, after all they created the scheme and could take advantage of the first-come-first-serve rules. Unfortunately for the rest of the hood, the number of laps required to get the same number of crackens keeps going up and after a while even the fittest folks in the neighborhood cannot do the lapse required to earn crackens. Cracken mania takes hold and infects the whole city. Those with crackens start trading these crackens f