After unsuccessfully attempting to use the recommended Oxygen XML Editor, I was reluctant to give it anymore of my time. It's awfully frustrating when a program claims your license key is in an incorrect format, no matter how many different ways you enter the license key (legitimately acquired from Oxygen, there was no piracy involved in this mysterious license key debacle). So I decided to use the power of Google to find something that wasn't so crippled by restrictions.
By way of "xml editor, open source," I eventually stumbled upon XPontus XML Editor. Aesthetically I'm quite picky with software, and although XPontus isn't quite the eye candy that Oxygen is, it isn't ugly in any real capacity. In fact, it is highly utilitarian.
XPontus provides the barest necessities, including validation tools (against external schema's or internal DTD's) and automatic external DTD generation given an XML document. An interesting extension of the validation functionality is a "Batch Validation" process, which when given a path will validate all files matching your user defined file extension. Another useful tool is XMLDiff, which when given two XML documents will highlight the differences between the two. This has proven handy in general comparison of documents throughout the homeworks.
I would highly recommend this application. It is open source and completely free. It provides the basic functionality we need (or have utilized thus far) and is highly intuitive and minimalistic. The program is written in Java, and is cross platform.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
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