Do you send objects over HTTP post? And how?

Question

I'm just getting started with some basic distributed apps which involve native apps on various platforms interfacing with a centralized web server. My first instinct is to send data to the server by having the client app send an HTTP POST with a serialized version of the data, but I'm a little unsure how I will handle the impedance mismatch between the many possible native platforms and what I'll be running on the server. Do people normally roll their own serialization to do this? Are there any standards in this arena? Is there a better approach to client-server app development?

Answer 1

XML and JSON are two commonly-used data formats for this scenario.

Answer 2

You might be best working to IPC/Distributed comms standards such as SOAP/XML-RPC. XML is great for situations where differing platforms share data because it is language agnostic and pretty much all languages these days have libraries for this.

Another option is a system such as CORBA/GIOP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORBA

Answer 3

The best way is not to invent yet another own protocol. SOAP, XML-RPC and XMPP are designed to this. If there's cluster/distributing stuff, it's recommend to use MOM like ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ.