Communication with ESP, HTTP requests or WebSocket?

Question

Here is my problem. I'm working on making a wifi addressable RGB LED (like WS2812b) controller, I'm using an ESP8266 as the hardware. I'm also creating a phone application for controlling the device and setting different modes. What I'm doing right now is that I communicate with the module by sending GET commands from my phone app. For example to change the brightness I send http://192.168.4.1/I125I Then on the ESP side the code is as follows:

WiFiClient client = server.available();
  if (client) {
  String inData= client.readStringUntil('\r');
  if (inData.indexOf("I")!=-1){
 BRIGHTNESS=str2int(inData.substring(inData.indexOf("I")+1,inData.lastIndexOf("I")));
}}

It works, but I'm not sure if this way of sending data is efficient at all. if change colors too rapidly the ESP resets. I recently found another code that uses GET and POST commands but different methods are used, like the following

server.on("/brightness", HTTP_POST, []() {
    adjustBrightness();
  }); 

Then inside adjustBrightness function brightness is adjusted. This way it looks more professional but Is it more efficient?

I recently bought a commercial RGB LED controller that uses ESP8266 as its core. I tried to see what the phone app sends to the controller using the Drony app. For my app I could see all the get command the app was sending

192.168.4.1/I255I

192.168.4.1/R200RG90GB76B

...

but for the commercial controller I just saw one connection, something like "157.10.12.10:5172"

Is this using websockets? Is using websocket a better way? is it more robust?

I'm writing the code in Arduino IDE.

Answer 1

This way it looks more professional but Is it more efficient?

No, the differences are minuscule. It's only really the location of any parameters that are different - either as part of the URL (GET) or as part of the body (POST).

Is this using websockets? Is using websocket a better way? is it more robust?

No, it's just a TCP connection (or maybe UDP connection, it's hard to tell from your description) sending unknown data. It's impossible to tell what the data us from the port number, you would have to actively sniff the data and work out what it is.

Yes, it is generally more efficient doing that kind of thing (though not necessarily more "robust") - HTTP is a very generic system that can transfer many different kinds of data in a request so needs large amounts of superfluous information that is not applicable to controlling an LED, whereas a simple TCP or UDP socket only transfers the minimal amount of data needed to get the job done.