Railo Rest JSON Web Service

So I've been writing lots of REST web services lately with Railo 4.0 and noticed a strange issue / feature when returning json.

So I write me a nice little function and I think everything will work with a little CFML magic:

    <cffunction name="getmuppets" access="remote" returntype="string" httpmethod="GET" restpath="/getmuppets">
        <cfscript>
            var arrMuppets    = [
                {name = "kermit", age = 20},
                {name = "fuzzy", age = 30},
                {name = "animal", age = 40}
            ];
            
            return serializeJson(arrMuppets)
        </cfscript>
    </cffunction>

All good? No :( The json is fine when you call the function locally, but when you call it as a rest webservice all the double quotes get escaped. Which renders it invalid json and is not much use for anything.

"[{\"age\":20,\"name\":\"kermit\"},{\"age\":30,\"name\":\"fuzzy\"},{\"age\":40,\"name\":\"animal\"}]"

So I eventually figured out you've got to change the headers and content returned by the function.

    <cffunction name="getmuppets" access="remote" produces="application/json" httpmethod="GET" restpath="/getmuppets">
        <cfscript>
            var arrMuppets    = [
                {name = "kermit", age = 20},
                {name = "fuzzy", age = 30},
                {name = "animal", age = 40}
            ];
            
            response    = {
                status        = 200,
                headers        = {},
                content        = serializeJson(arrMuppets)
            };
        
            restSetResponse(response);
        </cfscript>
    </cffunction>

Once you do all that, you get valid json:

[{"age":20,"name":"kermit"},{"age":30,"name":"fuzzy"},{"age":40,"name":"animal"}]