In case you have never come across JSON before, let’s have a quick crash course. It is a simple and lightweight way to express hierarchies of objects and their properties. It is a very popular choice when sending data in HTTP requests. It is similar to XML in intent but is much less verbose.

A JSON object is encapsulated in curly braces {}, while properties are denoted in the format key: value. Strings are delimited with double quotes "". We can represent a single client object as follows:

{
    "reference": "CLIENT0001",
    "name": "Dale Cooper"
}

Note that white space and control characters such as tab and newline are ignored—the indented properties are to simply make things more readable.