Joomla Pre-Installation Check - JSON Support: NO

Like most newbies trying their hands at Joomla, I was clueless when I found the pre-installation check shouting out in RED that the environment didn't support JSON.

First of all, this is what I'm using:

• OS: Mac OSX SnowLeopard 10.6.8
• Server: XAMPP 1.7.3
• Joomla Version: 2.5
• Joomla installation directory name under htdocs: joomla25

So the first thing I did to check what was going wrong was to check if the my server or the application environment really didn't support JSON. And how did I do this ?

Opened up the browser and typed in http://localhost/joomla25. This opens up a page with details of the server environment and I found that the JSON libraries were present.

Surprisingly, I didn't find any useful information to solve this in the Joomla forum. Although there were was one that talked about it but I could hardly say if there was a solution mentioned out there. But a little blog (http://desveladisimo.com/blog/solved-joomla-json-support-no/)told me that the solution to this problem is:

Create a file called as configuration.php in the root Joomla installation directory, which in my case is /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/joomla25 and give all users write permissions on it using
chmod 622 configuration.phpor
chmod a+w configuration.php

Thanks to the author to take the trouble to blog it and help some of us.
Now I clicked the "Check Again" button in the preinstallation check page and voila !!!

Wow, problem solved !! But C'mon, something here just didn't make sense ! WTF is the connection between JSON support and a dumb empty configuration.php file in the root folder ??????

A little thinking and that's when it occurred to me that , after the  JSON-support check was a check to see if the configuration.php file was Writeable !!!!! And that the actual problem was that there was no configuration.php file that gets created by default and therefore is not writeable. But the vertical clearance between the two is so less that it appears as though the NO status is for the JSON Support !!!
The attached image explains it a little more clearly.

So, at then end of this exercise I reckon that I was trying to solve the wrong problem !! But thanks to the clues that I got from the author of the blog I mentioned earlier, I was able to figure out both the problem and the solution.

P.S: And if this article was an eye-opener, don't be shy :). Just go ahead and +1 or Like this - so that people experimenting with Joomla are not put off by little problems and also so that they don't have to take the trouble of finding answers to problems they don't know :) !!!  Joomla!  !!!