What's the difference between an object literal and JSON? When do you use which?

Hey Robert,

Happy to hear you're loving the course, best of lucks in your journey!

An Object literal is when you declare an Object in JavaScript code which is a variable that stores data in key-value pairs, while JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and it's a language-agnostic format for storing and transferring data that is based on JavaScript Objects.

You'd use Object literals in your code when you need to create an object such as a user profile so you can later read and write its properties, or when you're working with classes which is something you'll see later in the course.

JSON is used when you want to store data and transfer it across different platforms and programming languages. One easy way to spot JSON is that you'll see its property names are always inside quotation marks:

{
"firstName": "Robert",
"lastName": "Paauwe"
}

While Object literals don't use quotation marks for their property names:

let myObject = {
firstName: "Robert",
lastName: "Paauwe"
};

You'll often see JSON data stored as a separate file from JavaScript (.json) while Object literals appear right in JS code.

There's more on that here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3975859/what-are-the-differences-between-json-and-javascript-object And here: https://medium.com/@easyexpresssoft/object-literal-vs-json-7a2084872907