Well, who needed another serialization format? Not me, but that's what I've made. Ruby Object Notation (Ron) is a textual format for the representation of Ruby data structures. It's somewhat like YAML, XML, or (most of all) JSON. However, since it is defined entirely within and as a subset of Ruby, it has the slick property that Ron expressions are legal Ruby. Thus it is very like JSON, except that it's Ruby-centered instead of being JavaScript-centered. Another way to look at Ron is as a purely declarative language for creating (almost) any type of Ruby data structure.