Question

Consider this JSON response:

[{
    Name: 'Saeed',
    Age: 31
}, {
    Name: 'Maysam',
    Age: 32
}, {
    Name: 'Mehdi',
    Age: 27
}]

This works fine for small amount of data, but when you want to serve larger amounts of data (say many thousand records for example), it seems logical to prevent those repetitions of property names in the response JSON somehow.

I Googled the concept (DRYing JSON) and to my surprise, I didn’t find any relevant result. One way of course is to compress JSON using a simple home-made algorithm and decompress it on the client-side before consuming it:

[['Name', 'Age'], 
['Saeed', 31], 
['Maysam', 32], 
['Mehdi', 27]]

However, a best practice would be better than each developer trying to reinvent the wheel. Have you guys seen a well-known widely-accepted solution for this?

Answer 1

One solution is known as hpack algorithm

https://github.com/WebReflection/json.hpack/wiki