Is XRX the only full stack web application "framework" that's totally W3C?

Question

XRX means an application where the front end is written entirely in XML dialects and the back end is written entirely in XML dialects and data is passed between them as XML over REST.

Is it correct that this is the only web application stack that is composed solely of technologies maintained by the W3C?

Aspirin

Answer 1

I think the best way to answer this is that XRX the only web architecture that I am aware of that incorporates two important web standards: XQuery and XForms, to create portable web applications. REST is not really a W3C standard per say, but an architectural style built around simple key-value stores. REST is usually contrasted with SOAP, which does not have the inherent caching abilities of REST. Some people like to think of REST as a "standard architecture" built around another W3C standard (HTTP). HTTP standardizes GET, PUT, POST, DELETE operations that enable REST architectures.

When I coined the term XRX back in 2008 [1] I found that there were many people using this style of simple web application development but it lacked a single name like "AJAX". Because XRX avoided objects, relational databases and object-relational mapping is was much simpler to use. This simplicity caused a large increase in agility and the ability for non-programmers to participate in web application development. If knew XML and a bit of XPath you could create applications after a week or so of training.

Now with the rise of many document store databases (Mongo, Couchbase, CouchDB) there now many similar architectures that share the property of avoiding the OR-layer (e.g. JQuery, BSON and MongoDB) but they lack portability across multiple clients and servers. XRX uses many XForms front ends (XSLTForms, betterFORM, Orbeon, IBM Forms) and many database backends (eXist-db, BaseX, MarkLogic) so you have more portability of your applications.

So my short answer is "yes".

1. http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/xrx_a_simple_elegant_disruptiv_1.html

Sarnoff

Answer 2

Here are a few others:

• Apache Wookie
• Akara
• SSWAP
• SPARQL Web Pages
• Apache Jena/Fuseki
• DB2 PureXML - (pdf)
• Read/Write Web Semantic Cloud
• RDF::Trine
• RDFLib
• RDF API for PHP - schema
• Notes on adding SPARQL to MySQL

Peursem

Answer 3

Actually the R in XRX means "REST", which is not in any way a W3C specification. So I don't think there is any application framework that relies on W3C technologies alone.

Panegyrize

OK, good point. Maybe I should ask a different question. I think there is something to this... the REST space in XRX is essentially used to transmit XML datasets between a client and server which are both written in XML dialects, right? – Aspirin

Well, I think in the original version the client had to be XForms and the server had to be XQuery; other people have generalized this to allow other X-technologies such as XSLT and XProc. But certainly, a key part of the idea is that both client and server use XML-specific languages. – Panegyrize