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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T20:35:05+00:00

As a personal project, I’m making an AJAX chatroom application using XML as a

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As a personal project, I’m making an AJAX chatroom application using XML as a server-side storage, and JSON for client-side processing.

Here’s how it works:

  1. AJAX Request gets sent to PHP using GET (chat messages/logins/logouts)
  2. PHP fetches/modifies the XML file on the server
  3. PHP encodes the XML into JSON, and sends back JSON response
  4. Javascript handles JSON information (chat messages/logins/logouts)

I want to eventually make this a larger-scale chatroom application. Therefore, I want to make sure it’s fast and efficient.

Was this a bad design choice? In this case, is switching between XML and JSON ok, or is there a better way?

EDIT:

Two mechanisms prevent a big server load when fetching information from the server:

  1. An “event id” is assigned to each message/login/logout, so all that’s sent back to the user is the events his client hasn’t yet processed.
  2. When an XML file becomes too big, a new one is created.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As far as I am concerned, JSON is always a good choice for async. data transfer, because it is not as bloated as XML is. I’d choose latter only if I want the data to be human readable, e.g. config files.

    — Edited:
    And remember: Serializing/deserializing XML is a performance issue and not particularly convenient for persisting web application data with high frequency access, while, as mentioned, using xml as config files is imo best practice.

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