In a new post to his blog Johannes Schluter looks at a helpful new inclusion into the latest versions of the PHP trunk - a new JSON serialization interface included in the core.

For many PHP objects the JSON-representation of the data is a bit more complex.for instance what about private properties or maybe you want to calculate some inner values? - In PHP 5.3 you were on your own. but thanks to Sara there's hope in sight: the new interface JsonSerializable. Classes implementing this interface have to provide a method jsonSerialize() which will be called by json_encode() and has to return a JSON-compatible representation of the data by doing whatever you want.

He gives two examples of this new feature in action - a simple one that just spits out some basic JSON as a result of the output of a class and the other that's a bit more technical, involving multiple class isntances, a stdClass and a normal array.