Discussion: JSON

[johncmerfeld]

As we've discussed, it would be cool to extend datascroller to other formats besides CSVs. Probably the next most useful datatype to support is object data – JSON.

Setting aside the bigger issue for a moment, there are a few ways we could implement this in the scroller. Python's pprint module has some nice options. The json module has a printing function that does okay too. This guy also wrote a pretty-printing function that looks nice – it looks like some of his ideas were adopted in the newest version of pprint though.

The bigger issue, of course, is how we integrate this into the existing scroller functionality. The choice seems to be between 1) having a separate class(es) for non-tabular data or 2) making the existing classes more general with tabular and non-tabular data as specific cases. Option 1 sounds easier to do, but option 2 sounds better from a code/design perspective.

So, anyway, wanted to post these thoughts and leave the discussion open.