Generating JSON feeds

In the last section, we used PHP's SimplXMLElement class to generate our XML feeds. In this section, we will use PHP's json_encode function to generate our JSON feed. Building a JSON feed is very simple when compared to building the XML feed. JSON is a very popular data exchange format and is considered lightweight when compared to XML, as shown in the following code snippet, present in the controllers/api.php file:

private function _generateJSON($root, $data){
  header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
  header("Content-Type: application/json");
  echo json_encode(array($root=>$data));
}

In this snippet, we begin by building our _generateJSON method that will expect the name of the endpoint and the data that was fetched by the get action. Now, let's modify the get action to use the _generateJSON method, as shown in the following code snippet:

if(strlen($method)>0){
  $data = $this->model->$method();

  if(is_array($data) && count($data) >0){
    $this->_generateJSON...