HTML single Checkbox: Best practise whether to use value attribute or not

today i had a discussion with my colleague. The question was whether to use the additonal value attribute for a single HTML checkbox or not.

My preffered way is using a single checkbox without a additional value attribute and in backend doing a check like if

if (request.getParameter(checkboxName) != null)) {
...
}

My colleague argues that is would be more transparent using a single checkbox with a additonal checkbox value attribute like value="true" and doing a backend check like

if (Boolean.valueOf(request.getParameter(checkboxName))) {
...
}

As we want to make a small convention about our internal checkbox handling im now trying to find a "best practise" but couldn't find yet. I saw so far only examples with multiple checkbox with the same name. In this case of course it makes sense for me to use different values.

For me it seems to be a bit overhead using a value attribute in case of a single checkbox since i get always a String with "on" if its activated/checked.

We are using a Java Servlet/JSP MVC environment and im not 100% sure if this "on" comes from ServletRequest.getParameter.