I am not certain but would like to open a discussion on type casting for jqGrid.  While building a viewHelper in Zend Framework for jqGrid I wanted to allow the use of Zend Config for defining column names and params.  While doing this I found two things that were issues for this.  Zend Config loads both INI and XML files with 100% of their values as strings.  It seems on their end there should be some way to explicitly type hint values but currently there is not.

With that said, loading from a Zend Config object I was forced to map out every possible option available in jqGrid as defined in the documentation and iterate through the params and cast them appropriately.  I believe, but have yet to confirm, that jqGrid is using === vs == which is requiring an exact type.  Everything works fine except for booleans when using JSON.

The value in PHP is converted to "1" when using JSON encode.  This obviously is a string and could be casted in both languages as a boolean.

I like the idea of using explicit types so I am leaning toward lobbying Zend to change up their code to allow type hinting in config objects.  Alternatively in jqGrid you could cast the values or not use ===.  Generally if I am going to use === I will attempt to cast the value before using that operator.