The Xing Origin Story

Xing was created by current and former developers at Logical Reality Design, a small web development agency. We've been doing web development for seventeen years, primarily using Ruby on Rails for the last seven.

Two years ago, we could see massive changes on the horizon for web applications. After relying on the server to do heavy lifting, the browser is taking over as the web's main application platform. Our company decided to dive in to this new direction head first.

Building a Javascript based client that talked to an API-only server was a bit more difficult than planned. Excellent tools that worked well in isolation did not always work together, and the complexity of development seemed to increase exponentially. We found ourselves re-solving problems whose solutions we had taken for granted for years. Other experienced developers were struggling, and new developers were completely lost. The barrier to entry that Rails helped lower had raised right back up.

Xing represents two years of efforts to clear these hurdles, both for ourselves and the community. Although Xing is our most ambitious technical project to date, we are very happy writing applications with it, and we just released the first large commercial application made with this framework. We also wrote Xing so small companies, like ours, can easily build amazing web applications and compete with much larger teams. And we offer it to new developers as a life raft in a sea of complexity.