A while back I discovered XPath and XFactor Studio’s implementation.
This saved me huge amounts of time. We use a lot of IMS based XML for educational activities – multiple choice, fill in the blank, quizzes, etc. The stuff gets incredibly complex and bloated, but it’s a “standard” so we are stuck with it.
Earlier this week my coworker, Sam Robbins, turned me on to Oxygen, a Java based XML editor. I was doing all my editing in PrimalScript, which does basic validation and formatting. But Oxygen rocks. My favorite feature is the built in XPath parser. Just enter an XPath expression and the results open in a new panel. Click on a result and that node is highlighted in your XML document. If that’s what you want, copy and paste the expression into your selectNodes call in the AS file. Wow!
To think of all those for loops I was using a few months back. Ugh!
Oxygen is great, but I hate-hate-hate the interface. Fruity icon’s galore. However, the XPath parser has become an invaluable tool, I’d like to see this implemented in other environments.
But I can’t even fathom how much time the switch to XPath has saved me.
The xpath parser alone make the purchase of this app a must if you use xpath. I does have some other feature like XML project manager, Schema Model View and ton of other things. It also runs on any major platform, Mac OSX, windows, Linux / Unix and is availible as an eclipse plugin.
I’ll hve to try this out very soon. Thanks for the tip!
Oxygen also comes with an Eclipse plugin, it’s all I use for XML editing.
Also check out XML Buddy if you wan’t a free solution for Eclipse.