A lightweight text-based, human-readable data interchange format for class-based object-oriented languages like Smalltalk. It can be used to serialize domain level objects, either for persistency or network transport. As its name suggests, it is based on JSON (Javascript Object Notation). It adds symbols as a primitive value, class tags for object values and references. Implementations for Pharo Smalltalk, Squeak and Gemstone Smalltalk are available.

The original Smalltalk Object Notation paper

The Pharo Enterprise book STON chapter

The most formal description is The STON Specification

Sven Van Caekenberghe MIT Licensed