JSONView: JSON browser from within Firefox
JSONView is a new Firefox extension that gives you a nice way to view your JSON documents (JSONovich also does the trick).
Ben Hollis talks about the extension:
The extension itself is pretty simple. I wasn’t sure how to approach the problem of supporting a new content type for Firefox, so I followed the example of the wmlbrowser extension and implemented a custom nsIStreamConverter. What this means is that I created a new component that tells Firefox “I know how to translate documents of type application/json into HTML”. And that it does – parsing the JSON using the new native JSON support in Firefox 3 (for speed and security) and then constructing an HTML document that it passes along the chain. This seems to work pretty well, though there are some problems – some parts of Firefox forget the original type of the document and treat it as HTML, so “View Page Info” reports “text/html” instead of “application/json”, “Save as…” saves the generated HTML, Firebug sees the generated HTML, etc. Just recently I came across the nsIURLContentListener interface, which might offer a better way of implementing JSONView, but I’m honestly not sure – the Mozilla documentation is pretty sparse and it was hard enough to get as far as I did. I’m hoping some Mozilla gurus can give me some pointers now that it’s out in the open.
