The antidote to the JavaScript industrial complex: How XMLUI puts the business developer back in control
For too long, the barrier to entry for building even basic business applications has been artificially high. The requirements for front-end development have included expertise in React, CSS, and other disciplines, forcing organizations into a costly and inefficient hiring cycle.
XMLUI was created to address this problem, designed for the “line of business app,” according to Jon Udell, a consultant and co-creator on the project. “I just have an app that is controlling some settings on my server, and monitoring who’s connected to my server… things like that. So that app is now written in XMLUI, and we’re kind of going through and refining it. That’s a nice dynamic, because, as you know, people try to do real things with XMLUI.”
For building business apps, he said, it’s “just delightful” to not have to know about React to get the reactive behavior, or to not have to deal with CSS. The out-of-the-box XMLUI theme enables an app that looks professional and behaves gracefully. “This is not, ‘I’ve got a startup and I’m trying to appeal to the cool kids with fancy styles.’ This is just basic blocking and tackling. You just need a form. They just need to look good; they don’t have to be ‘out there’ in terms of design and style. And that’s a really big deal.”
Further, by operating at a higher, more semantic level, XMLUI reduces the amount of code required. The result is a system where reactive behavior—the “when I change this, other things change”—is a natural outcome..
The need for a higher-level approach is magnified by the rise of AI coding assistants. While these tools can create thousands of lines of code quickly, a “vibe coding backlash” is inevitable, Udell said.. Developers realize they cannot give up control to these “idiot savants” that produce black-box code they cannot review, understand, or edit, he added. The risk of hallucinations and the inability to debug the AI-generated code is too great.
This is where the declarative nature of XMLUI makes a huge difference.. The developer remains squarely in the loop, able to examine, understand, and push back on the code as they see fit. This process is further strengthened by treating documentation as a “testable discipline.” If the AI cannot find a documented way to perform a task, it exposes a bug in the product or the documentation, allowing for continuous refinement of the platform’s learnability, Udell explained.
XMLUI, he said, can help two key populations: the component builder who wraps existing components (like those from React), and the solution builder who creates pure, reusable XMLUI components at a higher level of abstraction. The difference in the developer experience between using a raw, low-level component and a simplified XMLUI wrapper, Udell said, “is profound.”
Ultimately, the core promise to the business developer is threefold:
- You can get good results without being a React person.
- You can get good results without being a CSS person.
- You can get good results when working with coding assistance via the MCP server.
“Those,” Udell said, “are the top promises that we make to developers right now.”
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