Re: [xml-dev] XML tools for Eclipse

[David Carver <d_a_carver@yahoo.com>]

Elliotte Harold wrote:
>
> I've tried those in the past and found them to be incredibly 
> heavyweight while being crippled by both bugs and hideous UI. They're 
> a distinct downgrade from a plaintext editor. Unless patches that 
> throw out a lot of the underlying assumptions of the webtools project, 
> including anything labeled with the word "enterprise", are welcome, 
> I'd much rather see an independent effort that tries to build up from 
> a text editor rather than down from model-driven architecture 
> astronautics.
>
> If the Java tools in Eclipse had been designed like the XML tools, 
> then all code would be written with UML diagrams, and we'd just now be 
> getting beta support for an actual Java compiler.
>
Elliotte, I agree, but they have vastly improved standardization at 
least from the XSD and XML editor stand points since the early 0.7, 1.0, 
and 1.5 versions.   Version 3.0 that was just released is actually 
useable with industry specifications.  In the past I had been using 
OxygenXML's eclipse plugin for all my editing and support of XML, but 
the latest version of the tools is on par with Oxygen for basic editing 
(Oxygen still beats it in other areas).

The issue being is that very few of the developers are XML experts, so 
don't eat what they write.  I've helped stablize many problems areas in 
the XSD and XML editors.   Unless the XML community that also knows how 
to write code, helps contribute back patches to correct issues, the 
issue is just going to propogate.   The big problem is that companies 
like IBM, SAP, and Oracle are building tools based on this code base, so 
the errors that show up in the eclipse plugins, propogate to the tooling 
that is being built upon.

You can see many of my rants about this to the eclipse community at my blog:

http://intellectualcramps.blogspot.com/

I encourage the XML community as a whole, to help eclipse fix the 
issues.  They have a small team, so as much community help as they can 
get would be appreciated.