JSON is plain text built from objects ({"key": value}), arrays ([1, 2, 3]), strings, numbers, booleans, and null. That's the whole spec.
Despite the name (JavaScript Object Notation) it's language-neutral. Every modern language has a built-in parser.
Common gotchas: no comments, no trailing commas, all keys must be strings, no support for dates (use ISO 8601 strings).