XML Interface for Network Services

XINS
Developer(s) Online Breedband B.V.
Initial release ?
Stable release 2.2  (22 December 2008) [±]
Preview release 2.2  (22 December 2008) [±]
Written in ?
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in ?
Type Web services
License BSD
Website xins.org

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.

<project name="MyProject" domain="com.mycompany">
  <api name="MyAPI">
    <impl/>
    <environments/>
  </api>
</project>

Here is an example of a specification of an environment list:

<environments>
  <environment id="netarray" url="http://xins.users.mcs2.netarray.com/myproject/xins/"/>
</environments>

An example of an API specification file:

<api name="MyAPI">
  <description>My first XINS API</description>
  <function name="Hello"/>
</api>

An example of a function definition:

<function name="Hello">
  <description>Greets the indicated person.</description>
  <input>
    <param name="name" required="true">
      <description>The name of the person to be greeted.</description>
    </param>
  </input>
  <output>
    <param name="greeting" required="true">
      <description>The constructed greeting.</description>
    </param>
  </output>
</function>

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=Doe

Example of a successful response:

<result>
   <param name="greeting">Hello John Doe!</param>
</result>

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:

External links