What XML Tools Do You Use? 70
Omega1045 asks: "What XML tools do you use? XML Spy? EditPad? A pen, notepad, scanner, and a good OCR program? XML is now becoming more than just hype. XML, SOAP Web Services, and Enterprise Integration (EI) are really taking off from the number and type of contract opportunities I am seeing and receiving. Until recently, I was doing most of my XML by hand. Other than the nostalgia for those early HTML days, it is really eating into my time. I have started trying XML Spy, but to buy it will be a big hit in the wallet (which I am willing to do if it is the best thing out there). What does Slashdot recommend?"
XMLSpy (Score:2, Interesting)
xmlspy (Score:5, Informative)
Particularly the schema editor and the Authentic component (which is now free (as in beer)).
In litteraly no time you can throw together a complex schema and make a nice gui interface for entering data which validates against said schema.
It is definitely pricey and I can't say that I would have bought it for myself, but if you have to deal with a lot of XML then it is truly worth it.
First post?
Re:xmlspy (Score:1)
I'm not saying anything good or bad about it, the .sps is ok, but just so everyone knows.
Does anyone know of any alternatives (obviously they can't stick to web standards, they want to provide a word processor in a browser, but is there something similar for Mozilla?)
Interactive structured drawing (Score:5, Informative)
God, I can't say enough about how cool Sodipodi has become.
Good luck finding a proper viewer for the interactive code, however. Mozilla+svg has not even been of alpha quality-- all proofing had to be in Windows, IE + Adobe's SVG Viewer.
Re:Interactive structured drawing (Score:2)
Also, gnome and KDE both use SVG extensively (for all their icons) so there must be SOME SVG viewer there. I know there is a SVG rendering library, so maybe someone has wrapped a viewer around it.
Re:Interactive structured drawing (Score:2)
This particular project had requirements that no client on Linux could reproduce: an XML/SVG object rendered into a scalable / scrollable environment that can respond to mouse events (hover effects and browser open upon clicking). That pretty much limits you to Mozilla or IE... Konqueror came closer than Mozilla to this ideal but was still unstable and quirky
A good, free choice (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A good, free choice (Score:1)
symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell
script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level
LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
--Good thing you're getting rid of that 100K. That would hold one heckuva bunch of ed files.
vim and my brain (Score:5, Informative)
Re:vim and my brain (Score:1)
Re:vim and my brain (Score:2)
Re:vim and my brain (Score:2)
Re:vim and my brain (Score:2)
Re:vim and my brain (Score:1)
Re:vim and my brain (Score:1)
The only choice... (Score:2)
tDOM and Tcl (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:tDOM and Tcl (Score:2)
Hah! Your a Tcl (tickle) guy!
Um, it's still hype. (Score:1, Redundant)
With most of the standards less then three years old (most are one to two years old), XML still seems to too volatile to base a long-term project on it. It would be like the early days of J2EE, where it takes only six months before the code base becomes "legacy".
Also, XML introduces a lot of complexity into a project, where it is often better just to use HTTP properties instead of complex SOAP exchanges, for example.
So, is XML really more than just a bandwagon, e
Re:Um, it's still hype. (Score:3, Insightful)
As for editing XML, I find that most of the time I'm manipulating XML programmatically, using JDOM, or using other libraries that manipulate XML themselves - I have yet to need to do serious hand-editing in XML. And even for that, I would think v
Re:Um, it's still hype. (Score:1)
Using the same data you can easily write transformations to xhtml, pdf, and lots of other formats, including or excluding certaing parts of the data depending on output format or other thing.
Re:Um, it's still hype. (Score:1)
Nigga please...
Re:Um, it's still hype. (Score:1)
Does it matter? The point is that many companies have jumped on the bandwagon. With wide spread support for XML it has become a quick way to transfer information from one program to another.
Re:Um, it's still hype. (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly, it's based on SGML, which is a standard, and is very stable, so questions of volatility simply don't arise. You can quite happily base a project on XML: while it may one day be supplanted, it can easily be transformed into a new format, unlike Java :-)
What software you want to use depends on what you want to do. If you're doing "data" type XML for e-commerce, then XML Spy or InfoPath will be
Only 8 comments? (Score:2)
Re:Only 8 comments? (Score:2)
Which of those modes does support XML Schema? Don't tell me about DTD. Today XML development is impossible without XML Schema. So, please do not mislead XML newbies about psgml being any useful.
stxx (Score:2)
It's a plugin that uses XSL and XML for the display layer in struts. IMHO, it forces the MVC (model, view, control) pattern a bit more than JSP (java server pages), since you can embed java IN JSP. Extending XSLT with heavy duty business logic is really REALLY hard.
And I shall shout thy name from the hilltops: (Score:1)
Always friend and often savior.
Amen.
Although, the BBEdit Anthology [barebones.com] is a bit crazy.
hype? (Score:2)
i don't think you know what hype is. xml is very much in use just about everywhere that i've worked recently, and it is showing no signs of being outdated, or lacking in any way for the projects i've seen it used in.
hype is a coordinated effort to make something appear better (you can define 'better' on your own time) than it actually is, be it through advertising, or the word on the street, or whatever. XML is great, and everyone that uses it knows it - they don
Re:hype? (Score:2)
I use it, and I have to be told. . . (by you, right now)
You: C'mon XML is GREAT!
Me :No it's NOT!
You: C'mon XML is GREAT!
Me :No it's NOT!
You: C'mon XML is GREAT!
Me :No it's NOT!
You: C'mon XML is GREAT!
Me :No it's NOT!
Me :See . . . THERE!
Re:hype? (Score:2)
Reading for context: try it.
Xerlin & Saxon (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.xerlin.org
Saxon is an XSLT processor
http://saxon.sourceforge.net/
and hey they are both open source and based on java.
jEdit (Score:4, Informative)
jEdit is also great for more than just XML too! I used to be mainly an Emacs user - but I spend my days in Eclipse (for Java and C++) and jEdit (for everything else) now.
Re:jEdit (Score:2, Informative)
Also, jEdit has support for DTDs, and if you have a valid DTD for your document, it will find and show you errors in your document so that you can fix it properly if you ever break the XML rules.
--Jason
Re:jEdit (Score:2)
I did have to upgrade my computer to make it fast enough to keep up with my typing, but that was a few hundred bucks well spent (my
XXE (Score:3, Informative)
Some XML Stuff (Score:1, Informative)
Editors:
vim! ( I prefer )
Active State's Komodo (for ppl who need an IDE)
Perl:
XML::Simple for parsing simple conf files
XML:Sablotron interface to Ginger Alliance's Sablotron (xslt)
C:
libxml2 for easy creation and parsing
libxslt easy xslt in conjunction with libxml2
Command line:
sabcmd for xslt (sablotron again)
fop for xsl-fo to pdf
Re:Some XML Stuff (Score:1)
Perl: XML::LibXML Perl frontend to libxml2 XML::LibXSLT Perl frontend to libxslt
As for editing, in order of (my personal) preference: X?Emacs jEdit vim the PSGML modes make X?Emacs really nice to work with (after you figure out all the key bindings, anyhow). jEdit's facilities aren't too far behind, espectially if you learn to use its structure browser; my ranking of vim is in part due to an inability to get it to do what I want it to do, even though
VIM rules it all (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VIM rules it all (Score:1)
Trygvis
More details, please (Score:3, Informative)
If you're engineering a lot of schemas, transforms, and other XML weirdnesses, XMLSpy is probably the most cost-effective tool there is, despite its high cost. But I've always found it inadequate for content editing. Which is my interest, since I'm a tech writer.
Everybody with a little Java knowledge and access to a component library has written a half-assed XML content editor. But only two editing tools seem to be worth bothering with: XMetal and FrameMaker.
XMetal is very well designed. I was able to make it grok Docbook just by pointing it a the correct DTD. Unfortunately, it's Windows only. And it now belongs to Corel, which doesn't make one optimistic about its future.
Adobe now provides the "structured" version of FrameMaker for no extra charge when you buy the regular SKU. And FrameMaker runs on Windows and most Unixes. (Not Linux, alas.) Problems: the worst UI design in the universe. And defining new XML applications is a nightmare.
Re:More details, please (Score:1)
Re:More details, please (Score:2)
Re:More details, please (Score:1)
Right, do you mean European XML or African XML? (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone has already mentioned jEdit as a Java editor with useful XML/XSL plugins. I'd add, especially for Mac OS X users, the oXygen XML editor [oxygenxml.com], also Java-based, which provides a very comfortable editing environment with tag autocompletion and built in well-formedness checking and validation (including for XHTML documents, making it a nice Web editor as well). It supports XPath queries, has a built-in DTD generator [from well-formed XML], has a tree structure editor, and more. It's proprietary but not expensive.
Re:More details, please (Score:1)
It's in no stable state now, but they've got the interface right, and they seem eager.
Depends on your needs... (Score:3, Interesting)
To close a tag is a simple matter of C-c
Oh, and when you use C-c to insert tags, it automatically sticks it on the next line and indents it.
It's not for everybody, but it sure works great for me.
Re:Depends on your needs... (Score:2)
But what you describe is grotesquely suboptimal: do use psgml at least: Inserting separate start-tags and end-tags is the way to madness. C-c C-e inserts whole elements and there's a load of other keystrokes to make life easy (and menus too for those who prefer them)
Re:Depends on your needs... (Score:2)
Who cares about DTD? Today XML developmenet is impossible without extensive usage of XML Schema.
I think it's a shame that such a good editor (based on such a good language as Lisp) doesn't support XML Schema.
Cooktop (Score:3, Interesting)
It probably doesn't have all the features of XML Spy but it works pretty well. I use it occasionally for debugging Xpath and XSLT.
Might be worth a look.
A few (Score:1)
saxon for sxlt action
python - from xml import * in an interactive session and away we go
A text editor - I prefer Kwrite.
A web browser if needed - I prefer MozFire
Bunch of stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Since you went to XMLSpy first, I assume you're not comfortable with the emacs keybindings. In that case, try XMLWriter [xmlwriter.com] before XMLSpy. It's much cheaper. If that does everything you need, great. If not, I'd really suggest trying a Windows build of emacs with PSGML, Xalan, etc. If you prefer XMLSpy to emacs, that's fine, but try out the cheaper, or OSS, tools first to spare your own wallet.
Finally, if all you're really doing is a lot of web-oriented stuff like RSS, try HTML-Kit [chami.com], which has XML-oriented plugins that hook into parsers and transformation engines.
If you use PHP (Score:2)
It's written entirely and purely in PHP, including a parser, a tree-like XML structure, ability to query, modify, and output XML strings or documents. It includes XML, XMLDocument, XMLBranch, XMLLeaf, Tag, RSS, Tree, Branch, Leaf, and File classes. It also comes with very useful class documentation and examples.
Future plans include support and implementation of XPath (started already), DTD, XML-RPC, and other technologies. The package is licen
I use... (Score:2)
Netscape/Lycos, etc. to search for whatever functionality I need, such as a TV listing gill net that sucks data off of different sites, and sluices it into a MySQL db. I then download it with my web client, and do whatever install is needed.
If I need to mod the XML, any handy text editor will do, such as BBEdit.
Other than leeching pre-configured XML, I don't have any tools.
Hey, you asked....
couple of (free) editors (Score:1)
J (http://armedbear.org) is more lightweight than Jedit and faster, has better CVS integration, and supports a few basic XML-related features: a navigable tree of the current doc, syntax highlighting and indentation. Oh, and validation too.
Check out Tibco for Linux tools (Score:1)
They provide 3 different java-based tools for XML; an editor, XML Schema tool, and a XSLT tool.
As a package, these rock. They are stable, and support multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and several commercial unices. Together are slightly more feature-rich than XMLSpy alone. They aren't open-source tools, but they do have a 30-demo download and are somewhat cheaper than XML Spy.
I still prefer XML Spy for pure editing (I use the