RE: [xml-dev] W3C XML Schema design tools

["Ivan Pedruzzi" <ipedruzz@progress.com>]

Hi Eric,

There are a couple of things that Stylus Studio 6 brings to the table
that may be interesting to people shopping for a schema designer.

- User can simultaneously work with visual and text editor.

- It uses an intuitive navigation metaphor (like internet browsers) to
move between type definitions.

- The visual designer can switch between simplified and full view
depending on what level of details user wish to see.

- User can validate XML documents using Xerces-C, Xerces-J, MSXML, .NET
and XSV.

30 days evaluation can be found here
http://www.stylusstudio.com/download


Ivan


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 6:15 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: [xml-dev] W3C XML Schema design tools
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am mostly a Linux (and vim) user and tend to avoid as much as
possible
> writing W3C XML Schema schemas by hand much preferring generating them
> out of more polite formats (such as RELAX NG's compact syntax,
> spreadsheets or sample documents).
> 
> However, I can't hope that everyone will follow my choices and I have
> customers working on Windows who need/want to edit large semi complex
> WXS schemas by hand.
> 
> I have spent four days with one of them trying to use a recent
> evaluation version of XML Spy for that purpose.
> 
> On the bright side, their "Schema design view" is rather handy and
does
> a fairly good job to hide the complexity of the angle brackets syntax
> from the user.
> 
> On the not so bright side, some features common to most of the IDEs
such
> as refactoring features are missing and we've crashed the editor
several
> times (one time with a loss of our entire schema that had been deleted
> from the file).
> 
> And on the very dark side (IMHO), there are these bugs (or features?)
> regarding their support of W3C XML Schema.
> 
> We've carefully stayed away from breaking the UPA rule discussed in
> another thread, but we had the opportunity to see that XML Spy doesn't
> handle correctly something as straightforward as two consecutive
simple
> type restrictions involving enumerations.
> 
> What I find really surprising is that despite all these defects, XML
Spy
> seems to be the only choice for most of the people and I can't believe
> that there is no alternative, ie no other schema editor that provide
> graphical editing features while being conform to the rec.
> 
> Other editors such as <oxygen/> and stylus seem promising (at least
from
> their documentations)...
> 
> What are you using (or advising) to edit your schemas?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Eric
> --
> Have you ever thought about unit testing XSLT templates?
>
http://xsltunit.org
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org
http://dyomedea.com
> (ISO) RELAX NG   ISBN:0-596-00421-4 http://oreilly.com/catalog/relax
> (W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1
http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
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