You say these are key / value pairs. In that case, use #3: dictionary of key / value pairs.

If these are not key / value pairs, then don't call them "keys" and "values" and use #2, an array of dictionaries with arbitrary contents.

Structure #1 is just daft unless you need key / value pairs but also their order. Which you rarely do.

var object = {
    key1 : {
        name : 'xxxxxx',
        value : '100.0'
    },
    key2 : {
        name : 'yyyyyyy',
        value : '200.0'
    },
    key3 : {
        name : 'zzzzzz',
        value : '500.0'
    },
}

If thats how your object looks and you want to loop each name and value then I would try and do something like.

$.each(object,function(key,innerjson){
    /*
        key would be key1,key2,key3
        innerjson would be the name and value **
    */

    //Alerts and logging of the variable.
    console.log(innerjson); //should show you the value    
    alert(innerjson.name); //Should say xxxxxx,yyyyyy,zzzzzzz
});

If a channel is an object, not an array then you should use the first option, as you define channel specific contract. If a channel can have subsets of channels, then I suggest using the second approach as you can gain an access to specific subset via the use of a key ( which has to be unique in order to work properly ).

First off, you're not dealing with a "JSON object." You're dealing with a JavaScript object. JSON is a textual notation, but if your example code works ([0].amount), you've already deserialized that notation into a JavaScript object graph. (What you've quoted isn't valid JSON at all; in JSON, the keys must be in double quotes. What you've quoted is a JavaScript object literal, which is a superset of JSON.)

Here, length of this array is 2.

No, it's 3.

So, i need to get the name (like amount or job... totally four name) and also to count how many names are there?

If you're using an environment that has full ECMAScript5 support, you can use Object.keys (spec | MDN) to get the enumerable keys for one of the objects as an array. If not (or if you just want to loop through them rather than getting an array of them), you can use for..in:

var entry;
var name;
entry = array[0];
for (name in entry) {
    // here, `name` will be "amount", "job", "month", then "year" (in no defined order)
}

Full working example:

(function() {
  
  var array = [
    {
      amount: 12185,
      job: "GAPA",
      month: "JANUARY",
      year: "2010"
    },
    {
      amount: 147421,
      job: "GAPA",
      month: "MAY",
      year: "2010"
    },
    {
      amount: 2347,
      job: "GAPA",
      month: "AUGUST",
      year: "2010"
    }
  ];
  
  var entry;
  var name;
  var count;
  
  entry = array[0];
  
  display("Keys for entry 0:");
  count = 0;
  for (name in entry) {
    display(name);
    ++count;
  }
  display("Total enumerable keys: " + count);

  // === Basic utility functions
  
  function display(msg) {
    var p = document.createElement('p');
    p.innerHTML = msg;
    document.body.appendChild(p);
  }
  
})();

Since you're dealing with raw objects, the above for..in loop is fine (unless someone has committed the sin of mucking about with Object.prototype, but let's assume not). But if the object you want the keys from may also inherit enumerable properties from its prototype, you can restrict the loop to only the object's own keys (and not the keys of its prototype) by adding a hasOwnProperty call in there:

for (name in entry) {
  if (entry.hasOwnProperty(name)) {
    display(name);
    ++count;
  }
}

[What you have is just an object, not a "json-object". JSON is a textual notation. What you've quoted is JavaScript code using an array initializer and an object initializer (aka, "object literal syntax").]

If you can rely on having ECMAScript5 features available, you can use the Object.keys function to get an array of the keys (property names) in an object. All modern browsers have Object.keys (including IE9+).

Object.keys(jsonData).forEach(function(key) {
    var value = jsonData[key];
    // ...
});

The rest of this answer was written in 2011. In today's world, A) You don't need to polyfill this unless you need to support IE8 or earlier (!), and B) If you did, you wouldn't do it with a one-off you wrote yourself or grabbed from an SO answer (and probably shouldn't have in 2011, either). You'd use a curated polyfill, possibly from es5-shim or via a transpiler like Babel that can be configured to include polyfills (which may come from es5-shim).

Here's the rest of the answer from 2011:

Note that older browsers won't have it. If not, this is one of the ones you can supply yourself:

if (typeof Object.keys !== "function") {
    (function() {
        var hasOwn = Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty;
        Object.keys = Object_keys;
        function Object_keys(obj) {
            var keys = [], name;
            for (name in obj) {
                if (hasOwn.call(obj, name)) {
                    keys.push(name);
                }
            }
            return keys;
        }
    })();
}

That uses a for..in loop (more info here) to loop through all of the property names the object has, and uses Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty to check that the property is owned directly by the object rather than being inherited.

(I could have done it without the self-executing function, but I prefer my functions to have names, and to be compatible with IE you can't use named function expressions [well, not without great care]. So the self-executing function is there to avoid having the function declaration create a global symbol.)