Some people apparently encode the JSON as the key in a form POST, some people
do a form POST with a special key and the JSON as the value.
There appear to be a number of theories in the wild. I am not an expert I
just looked up code examples from several sources stack overflow and the like.
We probably need to get input from developers who have experience working with
different frameworks. I think the differences have to do with decoding it at
the receiver.
We originally had registration posting JSON but we changed form encoding as
that worked in all environments. We just need to be sure we are not creating
problems for people with the change back.
John B.
On 2013-02-12, at 4:48 PM, Tim Bray <twb...@google.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:44 AM, John Bradley <ve7...@ve7jtb.com> wrote:
> Nat and I hashed out the pro's and cons of JSON requests.
>
> If we POST or PUT a JSON object we need to be specific as there rare several
> ways to do it that may work better or worse depending on the receiver.
> This needs to be looked over and one picked.
>
> Hm? Not following on “several ways”, I’d have thought that POSTing JSON is
> just POSTing JSON, must be missing something. -T
>
>
> In the other thread about the server returning the update URI and being able
> to encode the client in that if it needs to takes care of Servers that need
> that info in query parameters or the path to do the routing.
>
> The use of structure can be used to enhance readability and parsing of the
> input, and output.
>
> However we need to temper our urge to apply structure to everything.
>
> IT needs to be applied carefully otherwise we start looking like crazies.
>
> If we do it cautiously I am in favour of JSON as input.
>
> John B.
>
> On 2013-02-12, at 4:32 PM, Justin Richer <jric...@mitre.org> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for forwarding that, Mike. I'll paste in my response to Nat's concern
>> here as well:
>> It's an increasingly well known pattern that has reasonable support on the
>> server side. For PHP, I was able to find the above example via the top hit
>> on Stack Overflow. In Ruby, it's a matter of something like:
>>
>> JSON.parse(request.body.read)
>>
>> depending on the web app framework. On Java/Spring, it's a matter of
>> injecting the entity body as a string and handing it to a parser (Gson in
>> this case):
>>
>> public String doApi(@RequestBody String jsonString) { JsonObject json = new
>> JsonParser().parse(jsonString).getAsJsonObject();
>>
>> It's a similar read/parse setup in Node.js as well.
>>
>> It's true that in all of these cases you don't get to make use of the
>> routing or data binding facilities (though in Spring you can do that for
>> simpler domain objects using a ModelBinding), so you don't get niceities
>> like the $_POST array in PHP handed to you. This is why I don't think it's a
>> good idea at all to switch functionality based on the contents of the JSON
>> object. It should be a domain object only, which is what it would be in this
>> case.
>>
>> I think that the positives of using JSON from the client's perspective and
>> the overall protocol design far outweigh the slightly increased
>> implementation cost at the server.
>>
>>
>> -- Justin
>>
>> On 02/12/2013 02:11 PM, Mike Jones wrote:
>>> FYI, this issue is also being discussed as an OpenID Connect issue at
>>> https://bitbucket.org/openid/connect/issue/747. I think that Nat's recent
>>> comment there bears repeating on this list:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Nat Sakimura:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Not so sure. For example, PHP cannot get the JSON object form
>>> application/json POST in $_POST.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It is OK to have a parameter like "request" that holds JSON. Then, you can
>>> get to it from $_POST['request']. However, if you POST the JSON as the POST
>>> body, then you would have to call a low level function in the form of:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ```
>>>
>>> #!php
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> $file = file_get_contents('php://input'); $x = json_decode($file); ```
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Not that it is harder, but it is much less known. Many PHP programmers will
>>> certainly goes "???".
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We need to check what would be the cases for other scripting languages
>>> before making the final decision.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -- Mike
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: oauth-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:oauth-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of
>>> Justin Richer
>>> Sent: Monday, February 11, 2013 1:15 PM
>>> To: oauth@ietf.org
>>> Subject: [OAUTH-WG] Registration: JSON Encoded Input
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Draft -05 of OAuth Dynamic Client Registration [1] switched from a
>>> form-encoded input that had been used by drafts -01 through -04 to a JSON
>>> encoded input that was used originally in -00. Note that all versions keep
>>> JSON-encoded output from all operations.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Pro:
>>>
>>> - JSON gives us a rich data structure so that things such as lists,
>>> numbers, nulls, and objects can be represented natively
>>>
>>> - Allows for parallelism between the input to the endpoint and output
>>> from the endpoint, reducing possible translation errors between the two
>>>
>>> - JSON specifies UTF8 encoding for all strings, forms may have many
>>> different encodings
>>>
>>> - JSON has minimal character escaping required for most strings, forms
>>> require escaping for common characters such as space, slash, comma, etc.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Con:
>>>
>>> - the rest of OAuth is form-in/JSON-out
>>>
>>> - nothing else in OAuth requires the Client to create a JSON object,
>>> merely to parse one
>>>
>>> - form-in/JSON-out is a very widely established pattern on the web today
>>>
>>> - Client information (client_name, client_id, etc.) is conflated with
>>> access information (registration_access_token, _links, expires_at, etc.) in
>>> root level of the same JSON object, leaving the client to decide what needs
>>> to (can?) be sent back to the server for update operations.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Alternatives include any number of data encoding schemes, including form
>>> (like the old drafts), XML, ASN.1, etc.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -- Justin
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-dyn-reg-05
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
>>> OAuth mailing list
>>>
>>> OAuth@ietf.org
>>>
>>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/oauth
>>>
>>
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