“Your name is in the MySpace code,” said Bill Clogston, chief architect at 8th Ring, to me on Monday. Since I’ve in no way been involved with MySpace’s design or architecture, it took me a bit to figure out that it’s probably something related to AJAX using WDDX, a pre-cursor to Web services that Allaire open-sourced in 1998. True enough, Bill had found wddx.js.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// Filename: wddx.js
//
// Authors: Simeon Simeonov (simeons@allaire.com)
// Nate Weiss (nweiss@icesinc.com)
//
// Last Modified: February 2, 2001
//
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

WDDX was probably the first XML-based approach for doing AJAX that got broad distribution (a dozen or so languages/platforms). Kudos should go to Nate Weiss who managed the WDDX open-source community and contributed a lot to the JS integration. MySpace was originally built on ColdFusion, which explains the tendency to use of WDDX.