JSON Tool
A visual tool to help build json data queries using jq (jq-web) or emuto.
Inspired by:
- https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ - The original JQ command line tool.
- https://github.com/fiatjaf/jq-web - Its web (in browser) variant as emscripten.
- https://github.com/kantord/emuto - An alternative written on pure javascript.
- https://kantord.github.io/emuto/ - Github pages view on the project.
- https://kantord.github.io/emuto/docs/try_emuto - Emuto demo.
Why ?
The purpose of this experiment, in browser visual tool for displaying JSON, is to help humans to click through the JSON structures. Such strictures that are today almost everywhere. The JSON has almost replaced XML in API and similar calls. However the structure of JSON is sometimes a bit too simple for expressing certains things. One example is that JSON is not able to express relation attributes to the parent ~ child relations. In case of XML there are node attributes to do so. But in any other cases the JSON serves better for humans and good enough for machines. There are even an attempts to convert XML to JSON which in most cased promotes the "mess" into JSON thus not used/usable too much (though mathematically/programatically correct).
The problem
When I encounter deeper JSON structure (or generally any tree structure) I have a problem figuring out the relation in between individual nodes and/or more distant relations within the tree. And as trees are pretty much everywhere this means having difficulties extracting information from docker inspect, az-cli, gcloud and any other JSON formated resposes. In many cases you can ask the particular SW to show human friendly variant, but that might only support subset of the information base that is provided by the underlying system. And not to forget the human friendly variant is not suitable for machine processing.
The eventual helper
I am far from proposing this as a ultimate solution to any problem, but rather sharing a small tool that I have made for myself to help me tackle my pain. The tool https://pexmor.github.io/json-tool/both.html is completely running in a browser packed using webpack processing a small copy & pasted chunk o JSON without sending anything to backend.
Note: you can download the whole project to your computer (and webpack it yourself) as well as all dependencies so you will be able to run completelly off-line. But you have to change the CDN referenced dependencies to your local files.