This chapter gives a description of the files and directories included in XINS package, so that you can find the wanted information quicker.
In the top directory of XINS, the following documents are available:
README.html contains a quick description
of XINS, links to the documentation and quick start to run a small
project.
CHANGES contains the change logs between
each releases.
NOTES contains the release notes with the
known bugs and the OS and Java version with which XINS has been
tested.
The docs directory contains the following documents:
The user guide (it's this document)
The Javadoc of the XINS.
The XINS primer. The primer is a description step by step on how to create your first API.
HTML Logdoc. This document contains a description of the message logged by XINS.
The XINS protocol. This document explains the communication protocol for the REST calling convention.
On the website http://www.xins.org/documentation.html, the following extra documentation is available
A document to help you migrate API written for XINS 2.3 or lower to XINS 3.0.
Articles over Asynchronious calls, Result caching, API implementation with scripting languages and XINS performance.
Presentations of XINS for managements and developers.
Three API examples are distributed with XINS. The API's are
located in the directory demo\xins-project.
Here is a description of the API's:
myproject: This example is a very basic
example, much like a "Hello World" example.
allinone: This example uses most of the
features including in XINS. The API contains 1 new feature per
function.
filteredproject: This example is an API
that uses the generated CAPI to call another API (the myproject
API).
The examples also include client examples. This shows how to call an API using different programming languages.
The most interesting examples are the Ajax
examples located in the directory
demo\capis\javascript. These examples show how to
call a XINS API synchroniously or asynchroniously with Javascript and
insert the result in the current HTML page. XINS works particularly well
with Ajax thanks to the REST calling convention and the XSLT calling
convention.
Here is a description of the Ajax examples:
callMyFunction.html calls the XINS API
using the REST calling convention and insert the result of the call
in the web page.
callMetaFunction.html calls the XINS API
using the XSLT calling convention and insert the HTML returned by
the call in the web page.
callMyFunction2.html calls the XINS API
using the REST calling convention and tranform the returned result
using XSLT on the client side. It then inserts the HTML in the web
page.
Because of security issues, when these examples are executed
locally using Netscape as browser,
callMyFunction.html will ask for authorisation,
callMetaFunction.html will fail and
callMyFunction2.html will fail.
XINS also contain examples on how to call an API using PHP version 4 and 5, Perl and Java. If you want to call a XINS API using another language, just call the API using the URL and parse the returned XML. You can also use the SOAP calling convention or the XML-RPC calling convention.
The package not only contains the documentation and the examples, it contains also the program :-).
The program is located in different directories:
bin contains the shell scripts. This
directory should be in you PATH environment
variable.
build contains the XINS library.
lib contains the third party libaries
used by XINS with their license.
src contains XINS source code as well as
the XSLT, XML and css files used for the code generation.
A Ant build.xml script is provided in the
root directory in the case you want to recompile XINS.