Programming ColdFusion MX, 2nd Edition

Using WDDX

In 1998, Macromedia (then Allaire) created an XML-based technology called the Web Distributed Data Exchange, or WDDX. WDDX is an open technology for exchanging both simple and complex datatypes using a language-independent representation of the data based on an XML 1.0-compliant DTD. It is designed to be used by any number of programming languages without regard to the platforms they are running on. A number of serialization/deserialization modules have been written for a variety of popular programming and scripting languages and are freely available. For the most up-to-date information on WDDX or to obtain the SDK, please visit http://www.openwddx.org.

What Can You Do with WDDX?

The first question you are probably asking is “What the heck can I do with WDDX?” Well, to put it simply, you can do a hell of a lot with it. Because WDDX allows you to represent data in a completely neutral and open format, WDDX is the perfect vehicle for sharing data between applications written in different languages. Imagine that you have an application written in Perl that performs some heavy-duty massaging on a large record set. Now suppose that you want to make the cleaned-up data available to another application within your company that is built in ColdFusion. How are you going to do that? You could write the data to a database and then query the database in ColdFusion, but what if the database isn’t accessible to your ColdFusion application, say because it is behind a firewall? What ...