WDDX

WDDX (Web Distributed Data eXchange) is a programming language-, platform- and -neutral data interchange mechanism designed to pass data between different environments and different computers.

WDDX was created by Simeon Simeonov of Allaire Corporation in 1998, initially for the ColdFusion server environment. WDDX was open-sourced later that year.

WDDX and XML-RPC, both created in 1998, were the precursors to and Web services. SOAP borrows the envelope/header/body structure and the transport + interaction neutrality from WDDX and the HTTP and RPC bindings from XML-RPC.

WDDX is functionally comparable to XML-RPC and WIDL. The specification supports simple data types such as number, string, boolean, etc., and complex aggregates of these in forms such as structures, arrays and recordsets (row/column data, typically coming from database queries). There are WDDX interfaces for a wide variety of languages, including ColdFusion, Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, C++, .NET, Actionscript, lisp, Haskell, Perl.

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