Raphael Stolt has posted a guide for those developers using the REST component of the Zend Framework to get it up and running, but transmitting JSON messages instead.

As I was unhappy that the Zend Framework REST server per default only responds in POX(Plain old XML), a bend over from XML to the 'fat-free' JSON format was favoured to reduce the client sided parsing effort. The first part of this article will guide you through the creation of the responsive part of a RESTful public API and continue to travel the path to achieve the articles purpose.

He starts with a brief overview of what a RESTful resource would look like and a sample structure before getting into the code. Then, it's on to the structure of the service, including the config file settings. Next comes to logic behind the service - in this case it's a service to get the list of albums from a "shelf". The response from this is an XML document (from the Zend_Service component) that he pushes through a custom JSON package to output a fully formatted JSON message of the same information.