Justsystem Relies on Java to Make XML Easier to Use -- ADTmag

Justsystem Relies on Java to Make XML Easier to Use

By ADT Staff
August 9, 2005

Justsystem, one of Japan’s largest software companies, is making its first foray into the U.S. market with an integrated XML development, runtime and authoring environment and two toolkits.

The development environment, which the company has tagged as xfy Basic Edition 1.0, is the first available that allows developers to author, edit and render any XML document containing diverse XML elements such as text, images and tables as a single data set, says Hideki Hiura, COO and chief scientist at the company’s newly opened strategy office in Palo Alto. xfy (pronounced x-fi), was developed entirely in Java, and therefore integrates seamlessly with most other application platforms, Hiura says.

The new environment extends XML from servers to clients, making it possible to create a variety of desktop and mobile apps based on XML.

xfy allows for the unlimited nesting of XML vocabularies, enabling developers to build compound documents of any scale and scope within a single environment, Hiura says. The environment is dynamic, so that updates to XML data appear in the xfy interface in real-time.

The environment has three components: XML Document Authoring, XML Application Runtime and XML Development Environment.

In addition, the company offers two development tools: xfy Developer’s Toolkit and xfy View Designer, which the company says enables developers and end users to build applications quickly. The developer toolkit consists of a debugger, code samples and a test environment. The company says this development and runtime utility enables developers to execute XVCDs without having to register them in the system as components. The advantage, Hiura says, is that end-user apps can be created faster than previously thought possible.

The view designer enables end users without programming skills to create their own applications for everything from creating maps that interactively display the migratory patterns of birds to generating customized order-entry forms on the fly, Hiura says.

Because xfy is based on Java, developers are able to add functions to their xfy apps that are beyond the scope of XML and incorporate them into these apps.

xfy Basic Edition is in beta and is available as a free download from xfytec. The commercial version will ship in October, the company says.