JSONize your PHP classes using traits

I was having a discussion with a colleague regarding how to add generic JSON based representation to a number of classes without making a big effort. The immediate solution that came in my mind is to use the Traits for it (introduced in PHP 5.4).

So I wrote the following example for him:

JSONized.php

 1 
 2<?php
 3 
 4trait JSONized {
 5 
 6    public function toJson()
 7    {
 8        $properties = get_object_vars($this);
 9        return json_encode($properties);
10    }
11 
12}

User.php

 1<?php
 2 
 3class User
 4{
 5    use JSONized;
 6 
 7    public $username;
 8    public $password;
 9    public $email;
10 
11    public function __construct($username, $password, $email)
12    {
13        $this->username = $username;
14        $this->password = md5($password);
15        $this->email = $email;
16    }
17}

test.php

1<?php
2 
3include_once 'JSONized.php';
4include_once 'User.php';
5 
6$emran = new User('phpfour', 'emran123', 'phpfour@gmail.com');
7echo $emran->toJson();

The result of running the above code will be like this:

1{
2    "username" : "phpfour",
3    "password" : "02c2ec1e3f21e97dd5ac747147a141e0",
4    "email" : "phpfour@gmail.com"
5}