Strongly agree - I've worked with ONC RPC, CORBA, SOAP, XML & XSD, XSLT etc. and I much prefer the relatively straightforward nature of JSON and JSON Schema. Yes it's not perfect - but for me it is more than good enough.
Edit: Of course, there is no direct equivalent of XSLT in the JSON world - which pretty much counts as a feature to me.
One thing I am wondering is whether the protobuf folks have a better development environment overall, or a worse one. Is the schema-to-self-validating-serialization-code approach going to win just as JSON won over XML?
This is what I was thinking, but no, skeptical. Protobufs are far more efficient, but dump the human readability for the data transfer, and that is where the logging and debugging happen quite a bit.
As to code generation, if you use someone’s package for confirm_my_schema(thisjson) isn’t that basically code generation just moved somewhere else?
Edit: Of course, there is no direct equivalent of XSLT in the JSON world - which pretty much counts as a feature to me.