[oXygen-user] looking for a good XSLT IDE

[Lars Huttar]

This blog post and comment thread are not mine, but I thought they would
interest the Oxygen developers. Maybe you have a response to the
statements made about Oxygen.

http://www.nesterovsky-bros.com/weblog/CommentView,guid,ca560933-6d05-4bbc-9bf5-d5736fb778ff.aspx#commentstart

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A good xslt IDE

A simple demand nowdays - a good IDE.

Almost a ten years have passed since xslt has appeared but still, we're
not pleased with IDEs claiming xslt support. Our expectaions are not too
high. There are things however, which must be present in such an IDE.

   1. A notion of project, and possibly a group of projects. You may
think of it as a main xslt including other xslts participationg in the
project.
   2. A code completion. A feature providing typing hints for language
constructs, includes, prefixes, namespaces, functions, templates, modes,
variables, parameters, schema elements, and other (all this should work
in a context of the project).
   3. A code refactoring. A means to move parts of code between (or
inside) files and projects, rename things (functions, templates,
parameters, variables, prefixes, namespaces, and other).
   4. Code validation and run.
   5. Optional debug feature.

We would be grateful if someone had pointed to any such IDE.

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Thursday, January 15, 2009 3:54:42 PM UTC
I can recommend oXygen XML Editor. IMHO it could satisfy nearly all your
requirements, except providing namespace prefixes which sometimes works
and sometimes does not. Altought it's written in Java it's pretty fast
and has best code completion I have seen so far. You will have to try
code refactoring on your own, I do not use it much.

Maybe you would want to try evaluation version of IntelliJ IDEA with
plugins XPathView + XSLT-Support and XSLT-Debugger. It's primarily Java
IDE but with use of mentioned plugins, writing XSLT is much easies and
"enjoyable". Best advantage of IDEA are advanced refactorings (provided
by both IDEA and plugins) and easiness of creating new ones.

I hope you will find this comment somehow useful.

Josef
Josef Pavlas

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Thursday, January 15, 2009 4:45:27 PM UTC
Josef,

Consider an example provided by xslt 2.0 spec:

    "...For example, if stylesheet B includes stylesheet A, stylesheet C
includes stylesheet A, and stylesheet D includes both stylesheet B and
stylesheet C, then A will be included indirectly by D twice. If all of
B, C and D are used as independent stylesheets, then the error can be
avoided by separating everything in B other than the inclusion of A into
a separate stylesheet B' and changing B to contain just inclusions of B'
and A, similarly for C, and then changing D to include A, B', C'."


Unfortunately oXygen does not provide acceptable code completion and
refactoring for such A', B', and C' modules, as it never looks defitions
in including modules.

We never tried IntelliJ IDEA, and we shall try it.

Thank you for your feedback!
Vladimir Nesterovsky


(the rest deleted)