In addition to the presentation I did in February :
I added a call to drupal_json_encode in the module.
You can see all of the change at
http://www.akwebsoft.com/images/drupal_group/feb_19_2014/
and fsbo.install.html and fsbo.module.html for code and install resources.
For those of you who weren't there for the presentation, the case study is at
Drupal_external.pdf
The external script correctly decodes the JSON.
BTW: I tried storing all of $GLOBALS at first, but drupal_json_encode (without any complaint)
just return a blank string. Not surprising.
Thanks to Brandon and Chris(?) for turning me on to using git even with a single programmer code base.
I'm in the process of converting my Mac workstation over to ubuntu so will incorporate git as a component.