In a modern PHP application that primarily uses JSON for its APIs, when might you still legitimately need to work with XML, and what strategies help cleanly integrate XML handling into an otherwise JSON centric codebase?

While JSON has become the dominant data format for most modern web APIs due to its simplicity and lighter weight compared to XML, many real world integration scenarios still genuinely require working with XML, such as consuming data from an older legacy enterprise system, integrating with certain payment processors or shipping carriers that still rely on XML based protocols, or generating specific document formats like an RSS feed or a sitemap that are inherently XML based by design, and a clean strategy for handling this within an otherwise JSON centric application is to isolate all XML specific parsing and generation logic behind a dedicated adapter class, converting to and from plain PHP arrays or objects at that boundary so the rest of the application never needs to directly deal with XML specific concerns.

class LegacyShippingXmlAdapter {
    public function parseTrackingResponse(string $xml): array {
        $data = simplexml_load_string($xml);
        return ['status' => (string) $data->status, 'eta' => (string) $data->eta];
    }
}