Lukas Smith has a new post to his blog looking at some of his experiences with working with JSON in the upcoming version of the Symfony framework (Symfony2), specifically in using the DoctrineUserBundle and load views via JSON.

Unfortunately right now there are quite a few issues with taking a 3rd party Bundle which wasn't specifically build to be accessible via JSON. So in the end I build a MultiplexController that can JSON-ify any controller. The name derives from the fact that it also supports calling multiple routes at once and returning all the data from all these routes in one request. But being good OSS citizens here at Liip, we decided to use this opportunity to try and come up with a more sustainable solution. The goal would be to make it essentially possible to have a 3rd party controller return JSON without having to do anything on the controller level.

He talks about the "magic" that lets you define the output format you'd like and how it works on the backend with the templating system to use templates based on the requested file. He points out a few issues with the method - a form request problem and that there's no good way to call json_encode from inside a twig template (as well as redirecting after submission).