Back in the mid-1990s, if you wanted to build useful software, you didn’t necessarily need to be a coding prodigy. You had tools like Visual Basic, an ecosystem of components, and the ability to simply wire them together. You were, in essence, standing on the shoulders of giants – the coders who built those foundational components. It was a time of rapid iteration, where ideas could quickly become tangible applications. If you’re under 45, you might not fully grasp the magic of that era, or perhaps you’ve noticed that the modern web, despite its advancements, hasn’t quite replicated that seamless component-driven development experience.
That’s where XMLUI comes in. It aims to bring that Visual Basic model to the modern web, specifically leveraging the React-based component ecosystem. XMLUI wraps React and CSS, providing a suite of components that you can compose using simple XML markup. It’s about democratizing UI development, making it less of a black art and more of a structured, accessible process.
Gent Hito, founder and CEO of /n software, the company behind the project, detailed the four-year journey to create it. He started this project to simplify the often overly complex world of browser-based UI development, noting that existing methods required “too many specialists.”
“We are back-end guys. We never build things with interfaces. We built our website. It’s a brochure, and that’s about it, very low tech,” Hito told CodeProject. “But then we realized we needed to build some management UI, some simple things in general. And I had no idea how difficult it was to do that on a browser surface. These days, you need a UI guy, you need a UX guy, you need an HTML guy, you need a CSS guy, you need a JS guy.. … this doesn’t make sense.”
When Hito showed the framework to consultant Jon Udell, he was skeptical. In an interview with CodeProject, he said, “It’s early. The people that really get it are few and far between. Most people are just – if you saw that Hacker News thread – it was mostly people just reminiscing about what XML and VB and UI mean to them. And a lot of them just, frankly, were telling us how we’re going to fail and how this has been tried before.”
Hito laughed as he noted that “several hundred people took time out of their Sunday to post on Hacker News about how this is a bad idea, so I’ll take that any day. I think that’s better validation than anything.”
Udell said he was attracted to the project because there was a real, demonstrable need for the solution, and that it is meeting that need.. “And in Gent’s case, the poster child is the app that they built on XMLUI to manage one of their servers.That kind of proves the point, that a team of back-end devs, with no React understanding, no CSS, not wanting to have to go down that rabbit hole, were able to do the thing that was needed for the business. That’s the story that you always want to hear.”
The project has struck a chord among developers, and from a blog post Udell wrote about the project, the first golden lead user was found. “All we’re looking for right now is the next several of those, and ideally, several who are not like these guys, because these guys are React and CSS pros. But even for them, they’re already seeing this as a thing that inclines them to rip out Retool for XMLUI, which is beyond what I think we would have even expected or hoped.”
Udell went on to discuss how XMLUI facilitates collaboration with AI by enabling the creation of human-readable and writable code, in contrast to complex React or CSS code generated by AI that can be difficult to review or modify.
He described having coding assistant Claude write a demo invoicing app, which it returned quickly and was “shockingly complete and functional.” But there was a lot of React code and CSS code that Udell was not competent to work with, he said. “I can’t modify it. I can’t collaborate with the AI at that layer,” Udell explained. “But now that stuff is expressed in XMLUI, it’s expressed a a much higher and more declarative level, in a very small amount of markupl. And I can forget the fact that it’s XML; it could be JSON. That’s sort of irrelevant. What matters is that it’s concise and human-readable and writable, as well as being AI-readable and writable, so it sets up the possibility for really productive collaboration with these agent AIs.”
Udell went on to say that the MCP server they have has access to source code and documentation, and that they are building out how-to examples that the AI has access to. “So when you are in an environment where you’re trying to build something, and you’re using one of these agents to help you, the goal is that it will always find a correct working pattern to base what it does off of. So it’s less likely to hallucinate because you’ve got links.”
The ability that XMLUI provides to understand the code, review it, and interact with the AI, Udell said, is “the kind of dynamic that we want to be having when we collaborate with these AIs, versus vibe coding. I tell it what to do. I don’t know how it did it. The human-readable format really makes the difference there.”
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