Simon Willison’s Weblog

Excited about XWT

16th June 2002

New toy: XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. This is one impressive piece of open source software. It allows you to create a graphical user interface using relatively simple XML markup (with ECMAScript to define interactivity). Your application can then be executed using a browser plugin, implemented as an ActiveX component on IE and a Java applet everywhere else. The idea is not to write whole applications in XWT, but to create server side applications and provide a client side GUI using the toolkit. Both SOAP and XML-RPC are supported for communicating between client and server.

The demos on the site are very impressive (although slow over a modem) and the technology is at a stage in development where it is ready for deployment. For more information, check out the project’s FAQ.