XMLUI builds React-based UIs with simple markup

A newly introduced open-source project, XMLUI, promises to allow developers to build React-based user interfaces with clean and modern themes without requiring React or CSS expertise. The XMLUI framework provides a catalog of components and a theme system that allow developers to build user interfaces declaratively, with XML markup.

Unveiled July 18, the XMLUI framework is intended to allow developers to read and write APIs, and draw on a modular set of components, to create web apps with little or no scripting. “XMLUI wraps React and CSS and provides a suite of components that developers compose with XML markup,” wrote Jon Udell, a consultant on the project, in a blog post introducing XMLUI.

“XMLUI provides out of the box a pretty rich collection of components, which are wrappers around open source components that exist in the React ecosystem,” said Udell, who has written for InfoWorld, in an interview on July 22. There are components for uses such as data display tables, lists, forms, and buttons. In his blog post, Udell reflected on an earlier era when software developers had Visual Basic and a rich ecosystem of components and could easily wire these components together to create apps, standing on the shoulders of the coders who built those components. “XMLUI brings the VB model to the modern web and its React-based component ecosystem,” he wrote.

Udell noted that the XMLUI project provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that can be used with an MCP-aware tool, like Claude Desktop or Cursor, to help build XMLUI apps. MCP serves as the bridge between AI agents and the developer, helping the developer guide an AI agent’s attention when working on XMLUI apps. With or without the help of an AI coding assistant, developers with XMLUI can proceed without coding anything more than small JavaScript snippets. Developers do very little JavaScript programming and do not have to deal with CSS, Udell said. JavaScript idioms and CSS complexity are encapsulated.

XMLUI was conceived by Gent Hito, who founded /n software and CData, Udell wrote in his blog post. He noted the mission of /n software was to make network communication easy for developers, while the mission for CData was to make data access easy for developers. And now for XMLUI, the mission is to make UI easy for developers, he wrote.