Srdjan Mijatovic and Bojana Miloradovic Parman are co-founders of Promind Systems. The company is a decade old, most recently responding to a growing demand for tools for building back-end processing for Web applications.

Promind’s proposal for a web-based collaboration system with the Department of Defense agency for Advanced Research (DARPA) won funding in a highly competitive situation and yielded the XSLmaker product. The company has subsequently produced XSLmaker in a shrink-wrapped version.

Mijatovic and Miloradovic Parman were recently interviewed by SYS-CON. Here’s what they had to say:

WSJ: Your company has been around for 10 years now. Do you think you were a little ahead of the curve when you started?

Srdjan Mijatovic: Sure, we like it that way. Seriously, we started as Oracle consulting firm in Chicago, working with the largest of databases and covering some pretty cutting edge stuff for Fortune 500 companies.

Then we worked with DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) on some exciting distributed agent technology. We were working with DARPA and the US Marine Corps on new ways of building web applications. That's where we came across XML. Building front-ends from XML data is surely possible in more ways than you can count, but we found that XSL does that in powerful and elegant way. This is how we started tinkering with XSL—and XSLmaker was born!

WSJ: When was that?

Bojana Miloradovic Parman: Well, it was two years ago when we started looking for ways to bring XSL to mainstream. So, yes, I would say we were little ahead, but not by much. What with XSL becoming the recommended way for doing the front-end with EJBs, and of course Microsoft being the first to put it in the browser—now it's in all major browsers including Firefox)—I’d say the whole evolution of our work so far brought us into XSL.

WSJ: Do you have a prototypical customer today?

Mijatovic: XSL, they way we see it being used, is gaining ground rapidly. Having said that, our prototype customer is really spread out accross the board. This is because XSLT is versatile and it truly covers web development end-to-end, lots of grounds to cover, and it does that.

Today XSLmaker is really being used by big companies and small web developers alike. You know, we have regular guys doing small web contracts—webmasters and developers—and big companies, government and commercial, alike.