Very useful within a business I'm working with. There are multiple data providers who's data shall fall into a single domain data model and they are providing that data in vast amounts. We deal with that by normalizing data, comparing it to present state of data and enqueueing patches into a queue from which application aggregating that data is picking and applying updates. Maybe one small thing regarding Java libs - jsonpatch comes under double license and is not suitable for commercial use so beware, better use zjsonpatch (I also like it more because it's more intuitive).