Oxygen

Yesterday, I finally gave in and bought Oxygen, a Java-based XML/XSL editor available for Linux. While it’s not an editor I’d choose for authoring XML documents (I still prefer something like XMetaL for anything beyond a page or two), I’ve fallen in love with it while writing XSL stylesheets for Arabic/Persian/Hebrew output for a client.

Until now, I’ve used ActiveState’s Komodo for the purpose but I have to admit that Oxygen is better. Obviously, there’s content completion for XSLT, but also for XSL-FO, which is very nice. You can also set a DTD or XML Schema of your own choice as the target output, which makes it a lot easier and faster to write stylesheets.

But the best feature is one that I don’t really expect to use commercially: Oxygen‘s got Relax NG support, both for writing Relax NG schemas and for writing instances. It’s really cool, but unfortunately, nobody seems to use Relax NG. It’s just me and a few mates.

And no, I’m not affiliated with the company behind Oxygen in any way. I just like the product. A lot.

2 thoughts on “Oxygen

  1. Shane Caraveo

    I wouldn’t expect to compete against any language specific editor, but Komodo does have the features you’re mentioning. Completion in Komodo is based on DTD or RelaxNG Schema’s, and you can add your own (eg. XSL-FO). We include XSLT completion which supports output completion as defined in the output element or namespaces. Naturally, we also support RelaxNG.

    Regards,
    Shane Caraveo
    ActiveState

    Reply
  2. Ari N

    I’ll have to check the new Komodo version. I have version 3, and it could not handle FO target completion. That it also handles Relax NG is certainly news to me.

    Thanks for the info!

    Reply

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