The search of an XSLT editor

XSLT and XML GUIs

In my quest for an XSLT editor that I can work with - this is what I found. I tested several tools I found on the Internet. The tools was mostly found using Google. I have no ideas what I need or want, nor do I know what exist on the Internet. This article is a summary of the profucts I found during this quest. I have not decided yet, but for me it seems like editiX is the product I'll choose.

Requirements

I need a tool to work with XML and XSLT documents. The goal is to speed up development of XSLT documents using a productive GUI environment. Price is also an important factor - I don't want to pay too much.

Visual XPath

Visual XPath is a graphical way of generating XPath query results. It can also be used to generate XPath queries dynamically by select XML nodes shown in the form of Tree. You can also generate queries for individual attributes.

This tool is not an editor but allows you to browse XML documents and get the XPath query to retrieve data. This feature is nice enough but not exactly what I was looking for. All the other tools tested already have this feature built in.

The source is available and the tool is written entirely in C# and .NET.

Xselerator 2.6

This seems to be quite a good tool, but from the copyright notice it does not seem to have been updated the last years. It uses MSXML2 and MSXML3 (given your preferences) and uses IE for rendering. (IE7 not support at this point, but the vendor have promised to fix that.)

This is a Windows application with two main windows. One is the XML document and the other is the XSL document. With one button you can see the output, if case of any error you can quickly see where the syntax error is.

XML Notepad 2007

A tool from Microsoft to edit XML documents. This tool is nothing but an XML editor, but it will transform XML documents (using IE) if you have a matching XSLT document. This product is made to edit XML documents as is somewhat good at it - as there are no free text editing of the XML document. But XML Notepad does not validate the document.

editiX 5.1

This is an Java application, available for Linux, Mac and Windows. This product have lots of features. You can read them all here, these are the ones most important for me;

• Can create DTD/XML schemas from and XML document.
• Can validate XML documents. (And verify that the document is well-formed in case a schema is not available.)
• Different screen layouts optimized for different type of documents.
• Can format the XML document with right indentation.

Comparison guide

A quick comparison between the different products.

Product	Price	Pro	Cons
XSelerator	US$125	Easy to work with	Seems to be out of date
EditiX	US$39 for home/academic use US$85 for commercial use	Lots of features	Takes some time to learn
Visual XPath	free	Source code available.
XML Notepad	free	Easy to edit XML documents and display transforms.

Tags: xslt, xslt editor, xml editor