XML & XSD Editors
I've recently been working with custom schemas embedded within Word (WordML) so I've spent a lot of time editing XML and XSDs. By default I use XMLSpy for this but prompted by a newsgroup post I decided to see if there was a better choice.
The two applications I took for a test drive were:
StylusStudioTibco TurboXml Having undertaken this exercise I can confirm that I'll be sticking with XMLSpy for now!
It maybe that I'm just comfortable with XMLSpy as a tool and hence a bias but I found the other two editors limited by comparison. Remember I was only looking at their XPath and XSD capabilities so the other two might be better at XSLT for example.
StylusStudio did feel like a polished Windows application however I wasnt impressed by its "generate XSD from XML" feature which was limited compared to XMLSpy and produced a very basic XSD. The "generate XML from XSD" was fairly lame too.
TurboXML was just awful. It has clearly be constructed using one of these write once deploy everywhere type technologies and it shows. For example, the first dialog which is displayed is resizeable but the contents are not. (Surely someone would have noticed this during testing?)
So, I'll keep an eye on StylusStudio because it show promise as an alternative to XMLSpy and it does have a non-model XPath evaluator (sadly clumsy to use) but I've written off TurboXml and wont be going back.
If you us another Xml editor which has great XML, XSD & XPath support let me know.
Finally, I am aware that I haven't included the XML editor capabilities within Whidbey in this review - this is because realistically I cant use them day to day on a project until Whidbey is released technology.