Bob Majdak has a quick new post to his site showing you how to log messages to Apache using a JSON format instead of the usual single-line information.

So this past week I have been doing a lot of logging, parsing, and graphing. I was sitting there wondering what I could do to make the Apache access logs easier to work with. Then it hit me, a brilliant stroke of win: why not format it in JSON? Then in my log parser I could just json_decode it! As far as I know there are no tricks to make Apache do this for you, so really all we have to do is define a custom log format that happens to look like JSON.

He includes the "LogFormat" line you'll need to add to your Apache configuration to make it log the JSON and a bit of PHP to help you pull in the file's contents and parse each line.

On the ProDevTips blog, Henrik shows an example of the "perfect combination" of PHP's json functionality and a powerful javascript library, jQuery.

Today I looked for a replacement for my old jspanserializer.js script that I can't even remember where I found anymore. Turns out that I wont have to either, I can forget it. From now on I'll use jQuery JSON instead.

A code example is included to show the simplicity.