Data Exchange with XML, WDDX and PHP

Interesting article, I hope you will go on on this subject with some articles about soap/rpc with real world examples, including system integration!

...it would be nice to see working examples in perl, jsp and python. Has anyone seen examples in jsp or python?

Thanks Roberto

What if you are using large amounts of data? Does wddx and or any scripting languages provide compression integration ie: gzip.

Very informative article as usual.

Thanks

You could either use the internal compression function, gzcompress or, which I preferr, use the Apache mod_gzip module. It compresses all your servers output.

No technical comment. I'm a junior. Simply cheering.

PHP is one step further heading for perfection. I'm waiting for big companies to open their eyes on this.

Oh, by the way, your article is enjoyable to read and very instructive, as usual. Thanks for bringing us this regular quality material.

Looks interesting. The tasks that are achieved are not massively complicated but I can see there would some benefit if WDDX was adopted as a general standard.

However, from my quick spin through the web site it did not look like this was the case. Are there other projects/methodologies that achieve similar goals that are more widely accepted?

Dave P.

If your version of PHP is > 4.04, use this line to dynamically cache and compress output:
ob_start(ob_gzhandler);
reference:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-gzhandler.php

I got the impression that wddx was used to pass variables from one scripting environment to another. I would like to know how to use it with php to asp, or php to jsp...

Cheers Sam

You'd better look for xml-rpc, basically is the same but much more supported.
The idea is that a php client can send an xml request to a jsp server and receive an answer in xml, gaining full cross platform/application interoperability.
You can look also for webmethods or biztalk ...

Thanks I will look for xml-rpc

Cheers Sam

Another eye opener in system integration is a soap - corba bridge i found on sourceforge, extremely interesting!

WDDX, how useful! Moving a variable between two applications is as easy as converting it to a format only 20 times the size of the original variable! Isn't that efficient?

Seriously I don't understand how XML is catching on so fast. A good standard for data was definitely needed by why is it so unbelievably bloated and inefficient? XML was made for machines to read anyway so why is it made so ridiculously readable to humans while essentially quadrupling the size of the data you have? I don't see why it is such a good idea to waste that much space. "Hard drive space is cheap" they say, yeah but you can't say the processing time to parse those godawful XML files is cheap. Nor is the bandwidth required to send them. Why couldn't XML have been a nice format where it had the names of each field at the top of the file and then everything else neatly compressed without all the redundancy?

Data Exchange with XML, WDDX and PHP

September 13, 2001 - You may never have heard of it before - but if your job involves exchanging data between different servers and applications, you're going to be hearing a lot about it very soon. Find out how WDDX makes it possible to create and transmit platform-neutral data structures across the Web, and how it can be combined with PHP to create a whole new generation of Web applications (including new content syndication and financial update services). Read the full article .

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