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XML Interface for Network Services (XINS) is an open source technology for definition and implementation of internet applications, which enforces a specification-oriented approach.
Contents
Specification-oriented approach
The specification-oriented approach is at the heart of XINS:
From specifications, XINS is able to generate:
Components of the XINS technology
Technically, XINS is composed of the following:
An introductory tutorial called the XINS Primer takes the reader by the hand with easy-to-follow steps to perform, with screenshots.
Since version 1.3.0, the XINS/Java Server Framework supports not only POX-style calls, but also SOAP and XML-RPC. And it supports conversion using XSLT. As of version 2.0, it also supports JSON and JSON-RPC.
XINS is open-source and is distributed under the liberal BSD license.
Specifications
All XINS specification files are Plain Old XML. Compared to SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/etc. the format is extremely simple. There are specifications for projects, environment lists, APIs, functions, types and error codes.
Below is an example of a XINS project definition.
Here is an example of a specification of an environment list:
An example of an API specification file:
An example of a function definition:
RPC protocol
The XINS Standard Calling Convention is a simple HTTP-based RPC protocol. Input consists of HTTP parameters, while output is an XML document. This approach makes it compatible with plain Web browsers.
Example of a request:
http://somehost/someapi/?_convention=_xins-std&_function=SayHello&firstName=John&lastName=DoeExample of a successful response:
Competition
There are no known products that provide an integrated approach to specification-oriented development, similar to XINS. However, there are several frameworks and libraries that provide functionality similar to individual parts of XINS, including: