Guies, that's nice to build an xml editor but there's a ton of XML editors free or not and enough is enough. Could you work on something more specific like RDF, it could be much more useful that rebuilding the wheel.
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Thanks for your feedback. How would you like the application to support RDF? All suggestions are very welcome.
On the point of rebuilding the wheel, I think you will find that most free editors out there (I make no apology for building an open source application that duplicates closed source functionality) follow specific and usually quite different design goals: for example, if you're looking for a wysiwyg editor with excellent DocBook support, you should support conglomerate.
This program pursues the following design goals:
* clean, unencumbered interface
Just count the menus, panels and toolbar buttons; some XML editors have a lot of them.
* high performance
This one is easy to test: try loading a 15MB dictionary and edit the text with tag completion/protection/folding switched on.
* portability
The source should compile from the same source files on Linux and Windows as a minimum. Crucially, though, this should not come at the cost of running on top of a Java virtual machine. A Mac OS X port is planned - the main obstacle being the cost of buying a copy of the OS.
* a different approach to spelling and style
The spelling and style check is designed to facilitate work on very large documents (with potentially thousands of unknown terms). The default dictionary has been thoroughly checked. Unlike the grammar checks found in office applications, the style check permits complex transformations of the content: for example, you can reversion your document from American to Commonwealth spelling, switch between -ise/-ize conventions or apply your organisation's custom house style.
* thin application layer calling mature open source libraries
Instead of reinventing the wheel, this application delegates most non-trivial tasks to libraries: the editor is Scintilla, the parsers are Expat and libxml2, xslt processing is courtesy of libxslt, regular expression are handled by PCRE, the framework is wxWidgets, and so on.
* on Windows, round-tripping of Word documents and direct integration from within Word
Full guidance is given in the help section.
A 'design goals' link will be available on the home page shortly.
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I agree that there are many XML editors out there. Here's some others I've tried:
- Altova XML Spy: Good, full featured (maybe a little too many features) but bulky and the 'free' version is nagware. This is what I used before XML Copy Editor since it does contain some nice features.
- XML Cooktop: Great little program but no XSD validation built in and not actively developed. Last version came out a while ago.
- XML Notepad: Made by Microsot, last version came out in 1999, still in beta, nothing too great here.
To me, XML Copy Editor fits my needs the best. It's quick, efficient, supports DTD/XSD validations, XSL, XPath, RELAX NG (which I don't use too much, but would be nice to learn), and a few other neat things. Right now it's a young program, but after it matures and grows, it will be a superior editor, one of the best of its kind available.
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First post here but thought I'd chime in as to whether you "wasted your time reinventing the wheel. I can see that those posts were made in Aug of 2006 and here I am in Dec of 2008. I am barely diving into the world of XML, XTD, XPath...and so on. I'm a developer and I first heard of XML Spy, used by my boss. It seems pricing/licensing was an issue. As consultants we are constantly switching sites, customers, even computers...here at only one customer site I've gone through about 5 different computers in a total of 1 year. I constantly have to switch computers b/c this one has this but that one has that. Having XML Spy on each workstation was not an option and me, being a fan of open source, and if possible, free, applications I did a web search and came across XCE.
Now while I don't use it on a daily basis, it seems that every app I develop here is centered around XML and end up having to come back to XCE. I still struggle to learn how to use it since the 'Help' documentation is rather weak! For example, learning how to use XPath (since I sort of got trained to use MS .NET's version of it) and the regex patterns (Scintilla and Perl's? formats) for 'Find & Replace' hasn't been easy but once I get it, it's proven rather rewarding.
And this is 2+ years later! So, no I don't think you've "reinvented" the wheel and certainly not wasted your time! Quite frankly, I've made XCE a part of my weapons (ahem tool) arsenal for development and look forward to learning how to master it (XTD, DTD, XLST)!!
So simply, thank you and keep it coming! I'll try to be an active forum participant since it does seem rather slow/dormant but also b/c you do seem to get back to your users consistently.
H
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Guies, that's nice to build an xml editor but there's a ton of XML editors free or not and enough is enough. Could you work on something more specific like RDF, it could be much more useful that rebuilding the wheel.
Thanks for your feedback. How would you like the application to support RDF? All suggestions are very welcome.
On the point of rebuilding the wheel, I think you will find that most free editors out there (I make no apology for building an open source application that duplicates closed source functionality) follow specific and usually quite different design goals: for example, if you're looking for a wysiwyg editor with excellent DocBook support, you should support conglomerate.
This program pursues the following design goals:
* clean, unencumbered interface
Just count the menus, panels and toolbar buttons; some XML editors have a lot of them.
* high performance
This one is easy to test: try loading a 15MB dictionary and edit the text with tag completion/protection/folding switched on.
* portability
The source should compile from the same source files on Linux and Windows as a minimum. Crucially, though, this should not come at the cost of running on top of a Java virtual machine. A Mac OS X port is planned - the main obstacle being the cost of buying a copy of the OS.
* a different approach to spelling and style
The spelling and style check is designed to facilitate work on very large documents (with potentially thousands of unknown terms). The default dictionary has been thoroughly checked. Unlike the grammar checks found in office applications, the style check permits complex transformations of the content: for example, you can reversion your document from American to Commonwealth spelling, switch between -ise/-ize conventions or apply your organisation's custom house style.
* thin application layer calling mature open source libraries
Instead of reinventing the wheel, this application delegates most non-trivial tasks to libraries: the editor is Scintilla, the parsers are Expat and libxml2, xslt processing is courtesy of libxslt, regular expression are handled by PCRE, the framework is wxWidgets, and so on.
* on Windows, round-tripping of Word documents and direct integration from within Word
Full guidance is given in the help section.
A 'design goals' link will be available on the home page shortly.
I agree that there are many XML editors out there. Here's some others I've tried:
- Altova XML Spy: Good, full featured (maybe a little too many features) but bulky and the 'free' version is nagware. This is what I used before XML Copy Editor since it does contain some nice features.
- XML Cooktop: Great little program but no XSD validation built in and not actively developed. Last version came out a while ago.
- XML Notepad: Made by Microsot, last version came out in 1999, still in beta, nothing too great here.
To me, XML Copy Editor fits my needs the best. It's quick, efficient, supports DTD/XSD validations, XSL, XPath, RELAX NG (which I don't use too much, but would be nice to learn), and a few other neat things. Right now it's a young program, but after it matures and grows, it will be a superior editor, one of the best of its kind available.
Hi,
First post here but thought I'd chime in as to whether you "wasted your time reinventing the wheel. I can see that those posts were made in Aug of 2006 and here I am in Dec of 2008. I am barely diving into the world of XML, XTD, XPath...and so on. I'm a developer and I first heard of XML Spy, used by my boss. It seems pricing/licensing was an issue. As consultants we are constantly switching sites, customers, even computers...here at only one customer site I've gone through about 5 different computers in a total of 1 year. I constantly have to switch computers b/c this one has this but that one has that. Having XML Spy on each workstation was not an option and me, being a fan of open source, and if possible, free, applications I did a web search and came across XCE.
Now while I don't use it on a daily basis, it seems that every app I develop here is centered around XML and end up having to come back to XCE. I still struggle to learn how to use it since the 'Help' documentation is rather weak! For example, learning how to use XPath (since I sort of got trained to use MS .NET's version of it) and the regex patterns (Scintilla and Perl's? formats) for 'Find & Replace' hasn't been easy but once I get it, it's proven rather rewarding.
And this is 2+ years later! So, no I don't think you've "reinvented" the wheel and certainly not wasted your time! Quite frankly, I've made XCE a part of my weapons (ahem tool) arsenal for development and look forward to learning how to master it (XTD, DTD, XLST)!!
So simply, thank you and keep it coming! I'll try to be an active forum participant since it does seem rather slow/dormant but also b/c you do seem to get back to your users consistently.
H
Thanks HeR, your support is much appreciated!
Best,
Gerald