This document describe the XINS Front-end Framework. The XINS Front-end Framework is based on the XINS Framework and included in the releases of XINS (since version 1.5.0). This document supposes that you already know the basis of the XINS framework. If you want to know how to install XINS and create an API, read the primer or the user guide.
The XINS Front-end Framework is a web application framework. As most of modern web application frameworks it separates the business logic layer which is using XINS and the presentation layer which is written in XSLT.
Here is a list of advantages compared to the others web application frameworks:
You can run your application even if you don't have any XSLT yet. Just ask for the XML in the browser and you will see the values returned by your function. You can in some cases even use the generated XINS test forms.
The presentation layer doesn't need to be included in the WAR file, so that deploy it when you want. Is there an error in a page? just copy the new XSLT file, no need to package and deploy again.
No need to write components for common things, just write a
XSL template, then use xsl:include to import the
XSLT file and xsl:call-template or
xsl:apply-template to call your XSL template with
the parameters you want.
You win at the same time all XINS features: statistics, security, runtime properties, Java Client API, HTML specifications. Your web application is also accessible using SOAP. The WSDL for your web app can be generated as well as the unit tests and stubs. And much more (logging, Open Source, performance, version management, ...).
A demo of the web application using the XINS Front-end Framework is available here.