Matrin Hardy has a new tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog today showing you how to use the JsonSerializable interface to work with objects and converting them to JSON.

Over the past few years JSON has taken over as the king of data interchange formats. Before JSON, XML ruled the roost. It was great at modeling complex data but it is difficult to parse and is very verbose. [...] I think we could all agree that writing less code that in turn requires less maintenance and introduces less bugs is a goal we would all like to achieve. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to a little known interface that was introduced in PHP 5.4.0 called JsonSerializable.

He splits the rest of the post out into three different parts: the "ugly" method of converting a sample Customer object into a JSON string (through an array), the "bad" method using a "toJson" method and finally the "good", implementing a class that implements the JsonSerializable interface for easy JSON-ification.