Oxygen XML Forum

Dear Oxygen Team,

As a decider, we have always serious difficulties to find the good from the wrong part. Your
tool seems powerful but there's several points I would like to be clarified :

- Is your product comparable to XMLSpy or XMLStudio for its features ?

- Could you explain your price strategy and why XMLSPy and XMLSudio are much more
expensive than you ? Is it due to a limitation for your support and/or about your XML tool ?

Best regards,

Tim Bartelo

Hi Tim,

- Is your product comparable to XMLSpy or XMLStudio for its features ?

Yes, it is! There are features in these products that are not (yet!) available in oXygen and there are a number of features in oXygen that are not available in these products.

As notable oXygen features that are not in these products I can enumerate:

- Tree based outliner automatically synchronized with the document while the user edits the file.
- Better content completion support - oXygen presents only the elements that keep the document validity, automatically learn the document structure if it cannot identify a schema and most important, it is able to present the schema documentation for the elements, attributes and values next to the content completion window (you can see that in this screenshot for instance)
- Support for Relax NG schemas and for documents based on these schemas.
- Support for NRL schemas and for documents based on these schemas.
- The XML Schema related errors are presented with links to the specification allowing the user to easily find the relevant part of the
spec that his document violates.
- Better XSLT Debugger - oXygen offers the only XSLT Debugger capable to handle Docbook transformations.
- Available not only on Windows but also on Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc.
- oXygen is available not only as a standalone application but also as a really integrated Eclipse plugin (same license covers both distributions).

- Could you explain your price strategy and why XMLSPy and XMLSudio are much more
expensive than you ? Is it due to a limitation for your support and/or about your XML tool ?

We target a large user base offering a high quality product at a reasonable price rather than an expensive product to a few users.

Best Regards,
George

<oxygen/> XML is not a cheep application, it is quite effective, as I have been on the learning curve for a couple of months deciphering cryptic XML How To books one after another, as I am sure many other O'XML users will validate themselves.
Due to my rude and obnoxious belief in standardization and my belief in ISO at home work and play I can say, with extreme honesty, that, inspite of the inevitability of the incurrance of bugs in any program, these Guys and Gals in the O'XML design faculty and the user-base are earnest in helping one another acquire an extremely portable and standards compliant XML authoring environment...

It's worth every penny without arguement!

I've used XMLSpy with BEA Web Logic Java web application development environmentsand as a standalone application, of which BEA and XML Spy are awesome in their own rights...

but at a frightningly 1,900% cost overhead on the consumer, as compared to O'XML on average, without taking into account, any special user/management specific training on the XMLSpy platform, that 1,900% markup is just for the license to publish publically for a commercial market.
If you would like extended user support packages, and a future upgrade subscription, you can expect to part with an additional $500 to $1000 dollars U.S. currency.
You can honestly expect to spend around the sum of $2000 to $4000 dollars outright to get what we have here with <oxygen/> XML, in one package, where-as, if you obtain XMLSpy, you might want to burn some more cash and obtain their XSLT editing suite for another $1000 or so...
When it is all said and done there are quite a few analogies that could serve to consolidate this situation in less than two lines, but unfortunately I can not remember any of them, so I'll put it this way...
Out of any 50 people put together into a single group, how many of those people will come across $99 dollars before they have saved up $2000, the answer is every one of them, you can not save money retroactively.
The O'XML pricing scheme affords longevity through affordability, it is in fact, a well known and more times than not the most honest marketing initiative, as opposed to have it all right here, right now.
Allot of companies price themselves out of the market, market niches, and or price their own product out of existence, due to a numbing market, where noone shows any interest in a product, and a company ends up with large bills due to unsuccessful advertising campaigns.

Get the XMLSpy home license, and the demo version of <oxygen/> and give each product a fair and focused run for functionality and ease of use for a thirty day period, and at the end of that thirty day period review the perfomance off each application, and take a look at which application you know more about to determine user friendly interface and learning curve.

The inherent complexities of making a determination as to the usability and effectiveness can be curtailed by comparing the features that you have used in both applications and find a relative understanding of, and compare the results for each against each other.

Essentially though, the learning curve evaluation says nothing about the long term as far as productivity is concerned, so you'll also have to look at which application developed, at your command, the most responsive and valid end product, with the fewest errors due to incompatabilities, bugs that hindered or even halted the inclusion of desired effects, and most importantly the fun factor, which application did you have the best of it with.

You will definitly want to design a project prior to activation of the application that you will test, and you can usually find some help in these here forums, and a good way to get some seasoning under your belt is to use a plain old editor first with your project code and a browser, which should yield the expected results, if the project itself is to standard, and this will also allow you the potential author the opportunity to become familiar enough with XML to understand what you are looking at and what result to anticipate, if you are not already familiar with XML itself.

Using a typical word editor and an XML help/tutorial site will get you up to relative snuff, so that you are not taking yourself for a fruitless endeavor, as in trying to explore an editor/authoring environment like <oxygen/> XML and run out of time with the trial period license, just trying to learn XML.

The process of shopping around for a deal can be a rather deep excursion into ambiguity (the unknown and mysterious), but if you take the time to do it right it will in itself pay you in the long run.

In my honest opinion and in closing, I can tell you that if it were not for the price, I would have purchased XMLSpy awhile ago, but now after using <oxygen/> XML, I look back on the concept of purchasing another product instead of O'XML and in my gut I can say in good conscience I would have regrets with that decision, oddly enough.
I hope I've helped you in your journey to find the best tool for your particular needs, and by the way, it may sound like I work for these guys, I don't, I'm currently gearing up for college for I.T. and web design (information/internet technology).

Anonymous wrote:Dear Oxygen Team,

As a decider, we have always serious difficulties to find the good from the wrong part. Your
tool seems powerful but there's several points I would like to be clarified :

- Is your product comparable to XMLSpy or XMLStudio for its features ?

Having been an XML Spy user for several years, I have now switched entirely to oXygen for all of my XML, XHTML, and SVG editing tasks. I would say it is comparable, but has better features (SVG preview, RelaxNG support).

Anonymous wrote:- Could you explain your price strategy and why XMLSPy and XMLSudio are much more
expensive than you ? Is it due to a limitation for your support and/or about your XML tool ?

As a W3C employee I actually have a free license for XML Spy; in addition I paid for oXygen myself because it was a better product. So for me, the cost equation worked the other way.

I find the support to be excellent - accurate, responsive, fast.

I needed RNG validation and RNG-directed editing; XML Spy does not give me that. I'm also starting to look at NRL/NVDL support. An I had had one too many auto-created XSD schemas that were incorrect. In my mind oXygen is a much better product.