What it is and what it does

WDDX: an XML application that allows the exchange of complex data between dissimilar programming languages. It has encoding rules for serialization of simple (string, numeric, boolean, etc.) and compound (arrays, structures, etc.) data types. It can be used over different transports: HTTP, SMTP, POP, FTP, etc.

Support in PHP

WDDX has been supported natively since PHP 3 was around. No need for external libs, all you need is to set up your PHP installation using "configure --enable-wddx ..."

Available functions

When using WDDX one needs to perform data serialization (wddx_serialize_value, wddx_serialize_vars, wddx_add_vars), create a data packet (wddx_packet_start, wddx_packet_end), and deserialize the data (wddx_deserialize). It is a simple and clean process, so we can use XML and PHP without having to create our own parsing code. ;-)