A newly introduced open-source project, XMLUI, promises to allow developers to build React-based user interfaces with clean and modern themes without requiring React or CSS expertise. The XMLUI framework provides a catalog of components and a theme system that allow developers to build user interfaces declaratively, with XML markup.
Unveiled July 18, the XMLUI framework is intended to allow developers to read and write APIs, and draw on a modular set of components, to create web apps with little or no scripting. “XMLUI wraps React and CSS and provides a suite of components that developers compose with XML markup,” wrote Jon Udell, a consultant on the project, in a blog post introducing XMLUI.
“XMLUI provides out of the box a pretty rich collection of components, which are wrappers around open source components that exist in the React ecosystem,” said Udell, who has written for InfoWorld, in an interview on July 22. There are components for uses such as data display tables, lists, forms, and buttons. In his blog post, Udell reflected on an earlier era when software developers had Visual Basic and a rich ecosystem of components and could easily wire these components together to create apps, standing on the shoulders of the coders who built those components. “XMLUI brings the VB model to the modern web and its React-based component ecosystem,” he wrote.
