Date: Mar. 16, 2001
Link: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/02/08/jini_xml.html
Source Author or Organization: Dave Sag, O'Reilly Network, ONJava.com

Crudlets were originally developed during the construction of the Risk2Risk Business-to-Business (B2B) trading exchange, and with the intent of bridging the gap between Jini (sometimes known as "Jini Is Not Initials", but not an acronym) and XML "extremists".

The Crudlet architecture uses the Apache Foundation server suite (Apache, Cocoon and Tomcat) running Java Beans (which contain the business logic) running on Red Hat Linux. The front end is built with Javascript, HTML and XSLT. A JavaSpace backend is loosely coupled to the business logic. A group of events called Crud events are expressed as XML tags (via a Cocoon Extensible Server Pages Logic Sheet), and map to the JavaSpaces interface.

A site designer can use the Crudlet architecture to structure an XML document that will become a Java servlet able to generate Crud events, which are received by the Java Beans containing the business processes. The users's browser receives an HTML page, an XML file transformed by an XSLT stylesheet, returned by the Java servlet. By employing XML and Cocoon, Crudlets give developers an open source Jini service method alternative to Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and Java Server Pages (JSP).

The Crudlet license is based upon the Sun Community Source License (SCSL).