Hey Guys,
Just to clarify, in non-recent versions of PHP, the interpreter was not able to automatically determine extension inter-dependancy, meaning that it was left to the user. In our case, Couchbase is dependant on the JSON extension, and thus it is unfortunately necessary to enforce the couchbase extension loading after the JSON extension, rather than being arbitrarily located in the load order.
Note that using the SDK with newer versions of the PHP interpreter solves this problem, as does using the 2.0 SDK on any PHP version, as we now make dynamic use of the JSON extension.
Cheers, Brett