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Re: xsl] Any Recommended XSL integrated development environments?


Ben Leighton wrote:

>     Im evaluating a range of xsl development environments. I currently
> use a combination of VIM an XT. Im considering products including
> cooktop, xmlspy, whitehill xsl composer, activestate komodo and emacs
> plugins. Any opinions on these or other XSL IDE's preferably with
> debugging features?
> Also can anyone point me to an MSXML 3.0 command line utility that
> allows me to run xsl and
> xml using msxml without having to use a third party IDE environment?

Hi Ben,

I have worked for some time with a beta of Excellon Stylus, have tried to work with
Cooktop and decided against it, and then came across the Xselerator.

I consider the Xselerator a very big step towards a really convenient, well-thought,
integrated XSLT programmer's workplace (or IDE).

There was big response to Xselerator recently at 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XSLTalk/messages

Other people have pointed out what are the advantages of using Xselerator vs
XML-SPY.

In yesterday's thread "Is XML-SPY useful for xslt?" here in the xslt-list, Laurence
O Garfield pointed out the following:
"XML Spy does a lot more than just syntax highlighting.  If you have a DTD
or Schema against which to validate, it offers fairly good code completion
features as well.  (XSLT, of course, has neither.)  Personally, I'm more
impressed with their grid view.  It takes a while to get used to, but I've
found it invaluable when writing XSLT to be able to drag and drop elements
around in the tree.  It's a lot nicer than trying to handle a complicated
tree in straight text format, colorized or no.

$200 is still a pretty steep price for it, unfortunately."

Compared to XML-SPY as described above, the Xselerator offers good tag completion
for XSLT and has a really nice XSLT editor, but its major advantage for the XSLT
programmer is that the Xselerator is really ***an integrated environment***.

You can carry out almost all XSLT programming task without leaving this environment.
It is not just an editor -- the Xselerator has good execution/testing (with not only
MSXML but also XT, Saxon and other XSLT processors) functionality, it provides a
***Debugger***, some Code Wizards, project-based orientation, snippets management,
... etc.

The initial reaction of some members of this list to the announcement of the
Xselerator was cold due to it's lack of Unicode support at present -- actually these
people didn't bother to download and try it at all...

There was a message by the Xselerator developers that they are working on Unicode
support and having it implemented is only a matter of time.

To summarise: I'd greatly recommend trying the Xselerator now -- I know that people,
who tried it do not need to be convinced by anybody about its value.

Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.





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