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The LeXml™ language is an XML and Java based web development architecture developed by Life and
Energy Systems, Inc. that accomplishes a seperation between the backend code that drives a web
site and the actual design of the site itself.
The unique design of the LeXml™ language was inspired by the very problems which in the past made it
difficult for us to deliver custom designed e-commerce sites and interactive web applications
quickly and efficiently. In the past with existing web scripting languages, the
graphic design of the page and the code that accessed the data base and
special functions were stored in the same file. This meant that each web site
had code that was essentially the same but customized slightly to fit the look and feel of the
individual site. These small changes in multiple slowly diverging sites made
our sites increasingly more difficult to develop and maintain. A
bug fix or enhancement would have to be duplicated in every single unique incarnation of the code
base for each site. In addition, as sites' code would evolve it would inevitably have a tendancy
for the basic code between sites to become incompatible from one site to another. The LeXml™ language solves these problems by allowing the site to
be designed independent of the basic common implementing code base.
The LeXml™ language is based upon the XML standard for it's markup language and incorporates the W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium) HTML-as-XML transitional DTD (Document Type Definition)
which enables all the HTML tags to be used in XML (although they must conform to certain
minor differences in markup between HTML and XML). This means that the bulk of a LeXml
page consists of HTML in XML which is simply output in the form of standard HTML by the
LeXml engine. However, the fact that the HTML is "digested" by the engine means that
optimizations and browser incompatibility resolutions could be done transparently by the
server allowing the page author to code in standard W3C HTML-as-XML and not worry as
much about browser incompatibilities.
The LeXml™ language standard then adds to this basic HTML DTD a set of custom tags used for the
calling of Java code modules (called HTML Interface Modules) and the performing of simple
logic. The logic allowed within a LeXml™ page itself is quite simple consisting only of if/else
comparisions since the idea behind LeXml™ is to enforce a strict seperation between code base
and design. The end result of this architecture is that a system is created by which up to
hundreds or even thousands of highly sophisticated interactive sites could be run off the same
code base. Fix a bug in, say, the credit card processing architecture and the bug is instantly
fixed in all the sites using that module. When new functionality is desired, modules can be
extended or new modules can be created without compromising backward compatibility with
existing running sites.
The interface modules form what we call a "WPI" which means "Web Programming Interface."
This is essentially a web version of the concept of the "API" (Application Programming
Interface) that allows software to run across different computers and to operate from the same
library code base.
Without a programming interface, programmers would have to re-invent every single tool that
they use in programming each time they wrote something, which is the present condition on
most web development platforms.
Page development using the LeXml™ language is rapid, with complex e-commerce web site
interfaces now taking only days or less to build as opposed to a week or more using older
technologies. And the properties of the LeXml language which provide for separating the
"displayed information" from code that provides the logic and interaction with the database
saves the confusion and difficulty of debugging both display and logic code together. Also, the learning curve for
developing in the LeXml™ langage for someone already proficient in HTML and with basic programming skills is not very high.
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