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> I am looking for a good XML IDE on Linux, which can support editing XML
> Schema and some other existing XML standards, like WML, VoiceXML, and so
> on. I am pretty familiar with XML Spy, which is based on MS Windows. I'd
> like to find any tools like it, which can provide multi-views for XML
> documents, especially for XML Schema. The free software is highly
> prefered.
For XML & XSLT editing on both Linux and Windows I am very happy with
the XML and XSLT plug-ins for jEdit[1].
jEdit is an programmer's text editor written in Java, being developed by
Slava Pestov and others. It has an extensible plug-in architecture, with
more than 60 plug-ins available. It's free software under the GPL.
The XML plug-in has many features to aid editing; my favourites from the
many are:
- the auto-completion of a closing tag when "</" is typed;
- the list of available elements at the current location when "<" is
typed if there is a DTD declared, or in the case of ANT and XSLT files
the available elements are pre-configured in the plug-in;
- a dialog of attribute options for an element if you hit enter after
selecting your element choice (a helpful reminder);
- folding on indents (a general feature of the editor), or folding
based on customized syntax (via another plug-in).
The XSLT plug-in allows you to run XSL transformations in the editor;
you can configure one or more stylesheets to be in the transformation
pipe-line (I am surprised that not all XSLT editors support a multiple
stylesheet pipe-line option).
There is also a XPath tool that let's you try out XPath 1.0 expressions.
I am currently finishing off some enhancements to the XPath output views
that should be available soon in the next XSLT plug-in release (I liked
it so much I started contributing).
jEdit's definitely worth checking out, regardless of the platform you
are running on.
Regards,
Robert McKinnon
[1] http://jedit.org/
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