In a new tutorial from jJason Whittenburg today on the Zend Developer Zone, he demonstrates how to use the Zend Framework and a little JSON to get your application talking to Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us is a social linking site to store web links. Some one afternoon while messing around Zend Framework I had the idea that it might be nice to add my Del.icio.us links to my homepage. This sounds easy enough as Del.icio.us makes available an RSS feed for this purpose. However, there is one problem; Zend_Feed does not seem to be able to parse this particular RSS feed.

The reason is that Del.icio.us makes use of some extended namespaces for its RSS feed. Normally this would not be a problem as we could simply write a new class to extend Zend_Feed to read this file. However, this is a quicker and simpler way. Enter JSON.

Since there's no direct JSON support in the Zend_Feed component, they have to load up the Zend_Json component to help out. He shows how to create both the controller and the view for the setup as well as a database to help cache the data from each request.