In the mid-1990s you could create useful software without being an ace coder. You had Visual Basic, you had a rich ecosystem of components, you could wire them together to create apps, standing on the shoulders of the coders who built those components. If you’re younger than 45 you may not know what that was like, nor realize web components have never worked the same way. The project we’re announcing today, XMLUI, brings the VB model to the modern web and its React-based component ecosystem. XMLUI wraps React and CSS and provides a suite of components that you compose with XML markup. Here’s a little app to check the status of London tube lines.
A dozen lines of XML is enough to:
Define a Select and fill its Items with data from an API call.
Define a DataSource to fetch data from another API call.
Use the value of the Select to dynamically form the URL of the DataSource .
to dynamically form the URL of the . Use a resultSelector to drill into the result of the second API call.
Bind that result to a Table.
Bind fields in the result to Columns.
This is a clean, modern, component-based app that’s reactive and themed without requiring any knowledge of React or CSS. That’s powerful leverage. And it’s code you can read and maintain, no matter if it was you or an LLM assistant who wrote it. I’m consulting for the project so you should judge for yourself, but to me this feels like an alternative to the JavaScript industrial complex that ticks all the right boxes.
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