Re: [xsl] good Open source IDE Tool for XSL

Subject: Re: [xsl] good Open source IDE Tool for XSL
From: Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:42:14 -0500
I'm glad this question was asked. Although it's off the beaten path
of "how do I accomplish such-and-such", I've learned a bit I didn't
know in an area that's interesting (to me, at least :-)


BMi> The Eclipse XSL Developer Tools, part of the WST, aren't bad either -  
BMi> particularly if you are using Eclipse for any other work.

Don't know anything about them. But I'm not likely to even try
anything that lists support for schema languages but not RELAX NG.


VCh> How could people forget to mention Marrowsoft Xselerator?

As this is a Windows-only product, I have never seen it, and probably
will never use it no matter how good it is. But you never know ...


BMa> I personally use kate and I'm very happy with it ;-)

I had never heard of kate, as I mostly use GNU/Linux without a
windowing system. But at quick glance it looks like it may be a very
reasonable solution for an XML aware editing environment. It may not
be powerful enough to satisfy Anil Kumar Veeramalli's use case, but
looks like it is certainly worth a try.


It would take a lot to make me switch from oXygen. (It took a lot,
including the steep academic discount, to get me to use it in the
first place -- I generally prefer open source applications.) But if
anyone is interested in writing a powerful Emacs mode for XSLT, I'd
be interested in joining forces. (Like I have time for that?) The
most important feature to me is completion, and oXygen does a really
good job of it (completion w/o requiring use of the mouse for element
names, attribute names, attribute values, variable names, template
names, xml:id= values, XPath components, and maybe more). But the
good news is that's probably not too hard to duplicate in Emacs.

Yes, a good XSLT IDE should also let you run the XSLT with one or two
keystrokes, and let you see the output of the run in the app of your
choice; and having built-in XSLT documentation and XSLT debugger are
also huge plusses. But it's the completion I couldn't live without.
:-)

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