Use JSON for data transport in AJAX calls

[Nicklas Nordborg]

We are currently using a homegrown tab-separated text format which comes with all the problems related to handling special characters, etc. Ok... most of this has been fixed, but it is still a bit cumbersome to generate and parse.

JSON is becoming a de-facto standard in web applications. There is plenty of existing libraries to use on the server-side and newer browsers have built-in support for parsing it. The format as such is also a lot more flexible than our homegrown format.

See: ​http://www.json.org/

[Nicklas Nordborg]

I'll start by changing the file upload progress as a prototype implementation.

​http://code.google.com/p/json-simple/ seems like a good implementation that is easy to use (on the server side).

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5554]) References #1570: Use JSON for data transport in AJAX calls

Added jar+script files needed for JSON support. Implemented this for the file upload progress.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5555]) References #1570: Use JSON for data transport in AJAX calls

Implemented this for lazy loading of subdirectories in the file manager. Deprecated the AjaxWriter class.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5556]) References #1570: Use JSON for data transport in AJAX calls

Implemented this for lazy loading of child nodes in the item overview and for the job progress reporter.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5557]) References #1570: Use JSON for data transport in AJAX calls

Implemented this for various plate/well releated AJAX calls.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5558]) Fixes #1570: Use JSON for data transport in AJAX calls

Implemented in the remaining (older and simpler) AJAX calls.