Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: WDDX (nasty!)

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:1/12/1999; 1:12:19 PM
Topic:Scripting on Windows
Msg #:2051 (In response to 2049)
Prev/Next:2050 / 2052

On their FAQ page: "How does WDDX compare with XML-RPC mechanisms? RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call, a mechanism used by distributed object systems such as DCOM and CORBA. XML-RPC mechanisms, such as DataChannel's WebBroker, are focused on providing a full distributed object protocol using XML and HTTP. Alternatively, WDDX is focused on providing a simple, light-weight data exchange mechanism for Web programming languages. However, it is straightforward to layer an RPC style capability on top of WDDX/HTTP based interactions. A number of developers are doing this already, and we expect standard semantics to emerge to support this kind of application of WDDX."

Well, sure, if they just compare it with WebBroker, they come out looking simple. I know for a fact that Jeremy Allaire is aware of our XML-RPC spec, and it pre-dates WDDX by quite a bit. This is not fair. We would never mislead people that way. I had much higher regard for Allaire before reading this.

The straight answer is that WDDX may be slightly simpler than XML-RPC (it doesn't do as much) but really only offers the (arguable) advantage of coming from Allaire instead of UserLand. One might reasonably ask why they didn't make their serialization format compatible with ours, since our public announcement and deployment predates theirs by many months. Two small companies, why do we have piss on each other like the big companies? It's silly!

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