Show HN: a small weekendish project - JSON Blob

Show HN: a small weekendish project - JSON Blob(jsonblob.com)

106 points by tburch 13 years ago | 28 comments

toki5 13 years ago |

I'm a touch confused -- http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/

Is this your site as well?

tburch 13 years ago | |

It's not, but it uses that editor. The difference between the two is that with JSON Blob, you can collaboratively edit/share your JSON and use it programmatically via the JSON Blob API.

toki5 13 years ago | | |

I don't know why it didn't even occur to me that the editor could be a third-party library. Duh :)

Thanks for clarifying, and great work!

callmeed 13 years ago |

Very awesome. I use http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ often but this looks much cleaner.

Do you plan to keep it up indefinitely or open-source it?

tburch 13 years ago | |

It's open sourced - https://github.com/tburch/jsonblob.

It's running on a single Heroku dyno with the free MongoHq service, so at some point I'll have to figure out what to do when there's more than 512MB of documents stored, but for now it's running indefinitely.

fredsted 13 years ago |

Nice job. I love these kinds of small helper/utility sites, it's big part of why I follow HN.

Is there a directory of sites like this somewhere, by the way?

Cyranix 13 years ago | |

I found three such directory sites which have different approaches.

http://hnshowcase.com : visual preview, filtering, social integration, etc.

http://showinghn.com : minimalist list based on /newest polling

https://twitter.com/JustShowHN : Twitter feed based on main RSS

ericcholis 13 years ago |

Could be useful if one was writing an DB Admin backend for MongoDB.

hellopat 13 years ago | |

I'm working on one right now and will definitely be integrating this into it. It's a perfect fit.

geuis 13 years ago |

Nicely done, sir. Wasn't exactly sure what the true power was for a minute. I really like the json editor, but what really sells it is being able to have mock urls that actually function. Perfect for setting up a data source via the api for use among multiple engineers. You should somehow make that bit of info more prominent in the demo.

tburch 13 years ago | |

Thanks! I definitely didn't do a good job at that based on the feedback I've received. I'll try to make it more prominent because that was the sole purpose of the project.

jarofgreen 13 years ago |

"This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave - data you have entered may not be saved."

... far to sensitive. You can press "clear" in the toolbar then try to close the browser tab and it'll pop up on a empty document.

Personally, I wouldn't have that at all.

Apart from that, it looks very nice. Many options for manipulating the JSON object, cool!

e1ven 13 years ago |

Nice! I have to use things like this all the time when debugging writes to mongo, so this is really neat. I like the design, although being able to resize the windows would be nice. On my 17" Macbook, there's more unused space that I really need.

It's also really cool that you can save/restore - I could see this being used like jsFiddle.

GL!

BillSaysThis 13 years ago |

I like the idea bu... When adding new key/value pairs, the text 'field' and 'value' should either be placeholders or selected on focus so a user's first keypress wipes those strings from the field. Having to manually select all is not intuitive and forces the user to do work easily done by the computer.

Erwin 13 years ago |

Regarding the presentation part of this, even if you don't use it for exchanging data, serializing JSON to YAML can output a nicely readable and terse structure. The example JSON ends up looking like this: http://pastebin.com/gw6SGz4U

mahmoudimus 13 years ago |

This is awesome :) I'm looking for a way to interactively build something like this into our documentation at https://balancedpayments.com/docs/api

tburch 13 years ago | |

Have you seen Swagger? https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-core/

I'm going to try to get this working for JSON Blob API's documentation over the weekend.

arms 13 years ago |

Very nice. This is one of those things where I don't need it right now, but in 2 weeks I'll be thinking "where the hell is that bookmark..." :)

syassami 13 years ago |

Nice, an upgrade from http://json.parser.online.fr/ for quick looks at json.

hnriot 13 years ago |

When I try to upload json it never seems to finish. Chrome/Linux

Other than that, I like it a lot. Very cool side project

kodablah 13 years ago |

Very clean. FYI, when saving I get a URL like undefined/api/jsonBlob/50e46e66e4b006ece99dff64.

tburch 13 years ago | |

Thanks! Fixed that... https://github.com/tburch/jsonblob/commit/00cba8c54692f7690d...

officialjunk 13 years ago |

Cool. FYI, the items within the drop downs are not usable on my idevice

cryowaffle 13 years ago |

The link to jsoneditoronline.org on the About page is incorrect.

tburch 13 years ago | |

Thanks! Fixed - https://github.com/tburch/jsonblob/commit/a4e6f145f5166c26e2...

cryowaffle 13 years ago | | |

cool, but you could have stayed in the g namespace just by adding http:// to the beginning.

cdcarter 13 years ago |

This would be great to tie into CouchDBs admin interface!

evan_ 13 years ago |

it would be nice if I could give it a jsonp URL and a callback function name