David Stockton has a new post to his ZendTutorials.com site today introducing you to an increasingly more handy Zend Framework component that can make your messaging needs easier. The new tutorial introduces you to Zend_Json, a component for generating and parsing JSON messages.

In the past few years, JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation has seemed to overtake XML and other data encoding methods on the web. [...] I've also seen numerous examples of developers who create their own sort of JSON encoder rather than either using json_encode or using Zend_Json. What inevitably comes back to bite them is when the data they are encoding contains a special character like quotes, colons, curly brackets, etc.

He demonstrates how the Zend_Json component helps to alleviate some of the worries with built-in features that handle everything from basic encoding/decoding, printing out results in a "pretty" way and a handy way to include executable Javascript (once it's evaled on the other side) in your payload. He finishes the tutorial off with a mention of a very handy method that will please those already having to work with XML - the fromXML() method that automagically converts the data over to JSON for you.