Saturday, June 21, 2008

XML tools for Eclipse

I was searching for some freeware tools for authoring XML and XSD documents. But my bad search inputs didn't return any good results.

So I planned out to create this tooling myself. I decided to use Eclipse as the platform for this, as it is quite robust and very popular.

After few days of effort, I ended up with a very basic prototype. The details are available at, http://gandhimukul.tripod.com/xml/xmleclipse.html. But still lot of work needs to be done on this code base to make it really useful for XML developers, particularly the content assist functionality which is presently missing.

I posted my thoughts about this on xml-dev list.

Dave Carver on xml-dev list suggested to me that there already exists such a tooling. It's the "Web Tools Platform (WTP)" for Eclipse.

I gave WTP a try. Personally speaking, I found it very good. It already has lot's of things that I need in XML GUI tools. Moreover, it's free and open source.

I have now kept WTP in my toolset to author XML, XSD and DTD documents. If required, I might try to tweak it's source code to do something new.

2 comments:

David Carver said...

You'll also be interested in the XSL Tools editor and debugger plugins.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/XSLT_Project

This is scheduled to be integrated in WTP 3.1 this spring.

Mukul Gandhi said...

Thanks, David for the information. I already have tried Eclipse XSLT tooling few days back, and found it good.

I'll again give it a try in WTP 3.1.

Thanks and best wishes for all the work, you and your team is doing with these nice plugins.