Struggling to make a decision,
I am currently using php lib curl to send data as x-www-form-urlencoded with the following code:
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($this->arguments));
or
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $this->arguments);
First question: The second option appears to have a larger content length, so maybe the first solution is better?
This method works well for simple messages like:
{
"name": "John",
"token": "2121232145",
"code": "7",
"data": "Hello"
}
However, if I have a data field that represents an object, encoding it into a URL can lead to verbose and messy messages,
On the flip side, I attempted sending it as application/json content-type
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($this->arguments));
The content-length may be longer for small messages, but when embedding JSON, this method is clearly superior.
Yet, x-www-form-urlencoded closely resembles the form data I need to send, except when a JSON is embedded.
Having two different servlet parse methods based on content types would not be elegant, so is there an alternative?