Despite much googling and hair-pulling, I can't for the life of me articulate the difference between json, objects, and arrays (in javascript). Below is how I've been using 2-dimensional data containers (afraid to use the words array, object, or json here). Please tell me what these two examples are?

//first example:

[

    {record_id:1,name:Frank},

    {record_id:2,name:Sally}

]



//second example:

{

countries: 

    [

    {id:1,name:Canada},

    {id:2,name:Mexico}

    ],

states:

    [

    id:1,name:Maine},

    {id:2,name:Alaska}

    ]

}