XRay XSLT/XML editor

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

Every now and then I find something that feels so right that I need to talk
about it.  Michael Kay's XSLT book and Tony Graham's Unicode: A Primer were
in that category, but now I've got a bit of software I'm really happy with.

Architag's XRay is a beautifully simple bit of work which makes hand-coding
XML and XSLT a lot easier.  It lets you put up multiple editing windows for
you documents and stylesheets, as well as output windows which let you see
the raw transform results or a Web-browser view of those results if they
happen to be HTML. As you make changes in one window, you see the results
in another.  Going back and forth is easy, though I'm wishing my monitor
wasn't a paltry 15" deal.

I reported on it for XML.com as part of the XML 2000 show floor review, but
this is the first that I've had time to really use it.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/xml2000/showfloor.html

It's only for Windows, as I believe it uses Internet Explorer and MSXML
(3.0 - support for real XSLT) underneath, and I don't know how well it'll
scale.  It's probably not the best tool for managing transforms of 3.2MB
documents using 1.1MB style sheets. There's very little extra support for
writing here - it checks your work, but it doesn't do the work for you. On
the other hand, it's really nice to see something which lets you do simple
work simply.

It's a beta (0.9.1), and I crashed it using the indent document feature.
Otherwise, it's been stable.

It's available, and for free, at:
http://architag.com/xray/

Leave it to a training company to come up with a tool like this, which
assumes you have a brain and can use it with the help of immediate
feedback!  Cool.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books