Wxdx

Wxdx is a lightweight, cross-domain data exchange protocol and format intended for streaming structured data between services. It emphasizes simplicity, extensibility, and low overhead, enabling real-time data sharing across distributed components.

The project originated in the late 2010s as an informal collaboration among several academic and industry groups. The name wxdx is an acronym that various developers interpret as Web X Data Exchange, though there is no single official expansion.

Design goals include a compact wire format, negotiation of capabilities, streaming support, and robust error handling. The protocol uses framed messages over a transport layer similar to WebSocket, with a lightweight handshake, versioning, and action fields. Payloads are defined in a JSON-like schema with optional binary encodings for performance.

Standards status: wxdx does not have a formal, universally ratified standard. An informal specification is maintained in an open repository with multiple community-proposed extensions. Version numbers such as 1.0 and 1.1 appear in references, but adoption remains heterogeneous.

Implementations: Several open-source libraries exist in Python, JavaScript, and Go, along with reference server runtimes. Clients can publish and subscribe to named data channels, and it supports features such as authentication, TLS transport, and message compression.

Applications include real-time dashboards, sensor networks, microservice inter-process communication, and data-pipeline coordination. The protocol is commonly chosen when low-latency, streaming data is prioritized over strict REST-style semantics.

Reception: wxdx is regarded as a practical option for lightweight data interchange in certain ecosystems but has limited penetration due to the lack of a formal standard and fragmented adoption. See also: WebSocket, JSON, REST, gRPC.