XML/ XSL Tools

December 29, 2005 1:16 PM

What's your favorite XML IDE? I'm looking for something that will show me the results of XPATH queries on the fly and transform XML via a stylesheet inside the tool.

I've found bits and pieces of what I'm looking for in things like Xselerator, XPath Explorer and a number of pay tools (most notably XML Spy). I'm not opposed to paying for a tool, but XML Spy is a bit pricey for what I need.

I also have a lot of options laying around that may already do what I need and I just don't know it. At work I have HomeSite, VS.NET and Komodo along with a bunch of things I've downloaded and never used.

In sum: how are we rolling XML-wise nowadays?

posted by yerfatma to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I always forget something: I also have a Linux box at work and I have started bringing my Powerbook, so platform-dependence isn't an issue.
posted by yerfatma at 1:17 PM on December 29, 2005

Damnit: and I own a copy of Textmate on said Powerbook.
posted by yerfatma at 1:18 PM on December 29, 2005

NOTEPAD!
posted by delmoi at 2:27 PM on December 29, 2005

I have an OLD (circa 2001?) copy of Excelon Stylus Studio, that was given to me because I'd written some XML articles for various magazines.

It has excellent XPATH support, as well DTD,XSD and XSLT support, including dynamic XML->XSL transforms. It also various views for XML including plaintext,tree and grid.

The XML files I tend to work with are usually around 5-10MB in size, and the tool does work reasonably fast. I just looked it up, and it is pricy though $99 for a single home user (I'm assuming cripple-ware), and $450 for a single pro license.

I did look around at the beginning of the year for other available tools, and I wasn't able to find anything that had remotely the same capabilities without getting into very expensive licenses.

The two tools that I've recommended to users are XML Notepad from Microsoft ( I guess it's not offered for free download anymore), and Access 2003 supports importing XML into tables automatically. Of course this doesn't really help XML developers.

On the backend I've used both XML.NET and MSXML(1-4). As you can see, I've mainly worked on MS platforms.

I mean I wish I could find a good free XML viewer with XPATH support, but I just haven't, so I keep using my old free copy of Stylus.
posted by patrickje at 3:12 PM on December 29, 2005

i think you want oxygen: http://www.oxygenxml.com/
posted by spock at 3:21 PM on December 29, 2005

I've found Oxygen unreasonably slow and memory-intensive for very large documents, but hey, it's Java.

(I use nxml-mode in emacs, which is awesome but has none of those features.)
posted by nev at 3:55 PM on December 29, 2005

(I silently second nxml-mode!)
posted by AmaAyeRrsOonN at 4:47 PM on December 29, 2005

emacs.
posted by bshort at 7:42 PM on December 29, 2005

I also use nxml-mode. nxml-mode will do schema validation, but I don't think it does transforms. If you want to do that, check out XSLT-process mode and xslide.

Having a built in command to run XPath queries would be sweet, and it looks like there's some code on the emacs Wiki, but I've never used it.

Some of the people I work with use XMetaL. I don't know much about it though.
posted by formless at 8:25 PM on December 29, 2005

Most xsl developers I know are using Stylus Studio
posted by jouke at 8:47 PM on December 29, 2005

The answer was Cooktop.
posted by yerfatma at 2:57 PM on June 27, 2006