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by ars 4116 days ago
Really? All the pages you program with forms, and links and whatever are sending you json?

I have no doubt you CAN do it, but most of the time you don't.

And since most of the time you are dealing with strings my question stands: Why do the conversion manually instead of letting the nice new feature do it for you.
1 comments
slight 4116 days ago
You've heard of JavaScript I presume?
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ars 4116 days ago
Even AJAX sites do not typically send all data back as JSON. Most of the time they use normal form-urlencoded data.

If you did send everything as JSON you would be bypassing everything PHP does with form/url data to make things easier for you (for example arrays). That doesn't seem like a good engineering tradeoff.

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slight 4116 days ago
Sending structured data from JavaScript to PHP is much easier via json and in PHP its as easy as calling json_decode() to get back and object or array depending on your preference.
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marrs 4115 days ago
PHP accepts nested key value pairs and frameworks can take advantage of that when accessing the $_REQUEST object. If you're bypassing the functionality that's baked into forms then you're going to have to put it back in at some point or reinvent it yourself.

And then you can't make a request to the server directly unless you format your data as JSON, which is a bit inconvenient, especially if you're debugging a problem.

So if using JSON as a container isn't gaining you some other benefit then it's probably best avoided.

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ChikkaChiChi 4115 days ago
If you live in one framework and always will, then I see your point. But if you want to have the ability to code out native solutions, use other tools where other tools may be more appropriate, or discipline your projects to be a little less biased, then asking PHP to parse JSON is not a huge buy.

That's how we've done it here and the modularization it has provided us has been incredible. PHP's json_encode and json_decode are also quite fast.

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marrs 4115 days ago
I don't really get your reasoning there. Forms are the mechanism for making parameterised requests over HTTP. If REST is your platform then it makes sense to start with them, regardless of any framework you are using.

I'm not saying using JSON as an envelope won't work - it is clearly working for you - just that I wouldn't start there, and I can't see that you couldn't work with the request object directly.

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