I have been doing a lot of work with JSON lately, which got me thinking. There has to be a better way to view all this data.
Technically, JSON is human-readable. But once you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of data points from an API response, it quickly stops feeling very human-friendly. Large responses turn into walls of nested objects and arrays, and even with formatting or collapsible trees it can still be difficult to quickly find the pieces of information you actually care about.
JSON is technically human-readable.
Until it is 5,000 lines long.
The Problem
I ran into this regularly while working with APIs in Newforma Konekt. We already had an internal tool that allowed us to export data for backup or archiving purposes, so getting the data itself was not the issue.
The challenge was reviewing it.
Once…