Adobe COLDFUSION 9 Manual page 1091

Developing applications

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DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS

Using Web Elements and External Objects

WDDX and web services

WDDX does not compete with web services. It is a complementary technology focused on solving simple problems of

application integration by sharing data on the web in a pragmatic, productive manner at low cost.

WDDX offers the following advantages:

• It can be used by lightweight clients, such as browsers or Flash Player.

• It can be used to store complex data structures in files and databases.

Applications that take advantage of WDDX can continue to do so if they start to use web services. These applications

could also be converted to use web services standards exclusively; only the service and data interchange formats: not

the application model, must change.

How WDDX works

The following example shows how WDDX works. A simple structure with two string variables could have the

following form after it is serialized into a WDDX XML representation:

<string>Property a</string>

<string>Property b</string>

When you deserialize this XML into CFML or JavaScript, the result is a structure that is created by either of the

following scripts:

x = new Object();

x.a = "Property a";

x.b = "Property b";

Conversely, when you serialize the variable x produced by either of these scripts into WDDX, you generate the XML

listed in the preceding code.

ColdFusion provides a tag and JavaScript objects that convert between CFML, WDDX, and JavaScript. Serializers and

deserializers for other data formats are available on the web. For more information, see www.openwddx.org.

tag and the wddx.js JavaScript functions use UTF-8 encoding to represent data. Any tools that

deserialize ColdFusion-generated WDDX must accept UTF-8 encoded characters. UTF-8 encoding is identical to the

ASCII and ISO 8859 single-byte encodings for the standard 128 "7-bit" ASCII characters. However, UTF-8 uses a two-

byte representation for "high-ASCII" ISO 8859 characters where the initial bit is 1.

WDDX data type support

The following text describes the data types that WDDX supports. This information is a distillation of the description

in the WDDX DTD. For more detailed information, see the DTD at www.openwddx.org.

x = structNew();

x.a = "Property a";

x.b = "Property b";

Last updated 8/5/2010