Re: [xsl] OT: Advice on Oxygen XML Editor

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rick,

At 10:12 AM 7/7/2006, you wrote:
> I am looking for a good XML editor and am considering Oxygen. If 
> anyone has any opinions or other recommendations, I would appreciate 
> it. I apologize if this question is not appropriate for the list.

oXygen has dynamite XSLT support so it's not completely OT (IMO), 
though you may be pushing about asking about its general XML editing 
... we could probably get away with it as long as we don't follow the 
thread far (or if we bring it back to XSLT).

I think oXygen is an excellent XML editor for users who are not 
afraid of "getting wet" with the tags. If you want to edit XML while 
pretending you're using a word processor, there are better choices. 
It's like the difference between driving an automatic transmission 
and a stick. Personally I like to drive a stick, but there are plenty 
of people who can't get out of the parking lot that way. Also, people 
think driving a stick is hard, but it's not; it mainly just takes practice.

oXygen is one of the best kits out there if you do stylesheet 
development and modeling, and you need an IDE sort of thing with 
comprehensive coverage of XML techs like XSLT, schemas (XSD, DTD, 
RelaxNG, Schematron). It has many nifty features such as tag 
completion, schema-aware tagging and on-the-fly validation, deriving 
an XPath to the element your cursor is pointing at and copying it to 
the system clipboard, using XPath to query documents being edited, 
batch validation and transformation, etc. (And these is just for XML 
editing; its XSLT debugger is nothing to sniff at either.) For an 
XML/XSLT user-becoming-expert, it really offers "network effects": 
the same XPath you learn writing stylesheets becomes useful when 
editing documents, etc.

oXygen really benefits from being assembled, in part, out of 
commodity components of known quality and resilience (excellent 
applications written by master programmers such as Mike Kay, James 
Clark and others), as well as being in Java -- it runs the same on 
many platforms, which is a big benefit in a mixed-platform shop like 
the one I work in.

The oXygen development team is also very responsive to user feedback 
and loves to include features requested by us, their users, often in 
the very next release.

One weakness that may or may not be significant to you is that it 
requires decent horsepower to run. Fortunately Dr Moore is still hard 
at work on that.

Cheers,
Wendell