Complementary Tools


As mentioned in Chapter 1, XMLSPY is not meant to be a replacement for your existing tool set, but rather is to be used in conjunction with other tools to help complete software development projects. The following is a listing of some of the complementary tools known to be valuable additions to XMLSPY.

XMLSPY plugin for Visual Studio .NET

Visual Studio .NET is Microsoft’s newest tool set for rapidly building and integrating Web services into Microsoft Windows applications. To learn more about Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/. Altova XMLSPY includes a beta version of Visual Studio Integration that allows a user of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to invoke XMLSPY editing commands from menu bars inside of the Visual Studio .NET editing environment. At the time of this writing, the plugin for Visual Studio simply launches a separate instance of XMLSPY; however, future versions of the XMLSPY plugin for Visual Studio .NET will include closer product integration. They will also allow any XMLSPY editing feature to appear directly inside Visual Studio .NET. Download the XMLSPY plugin for Visual Studio .NET at www.altova.com/components_microsoft.html.

Jasc WebDraw

Jasc Software, the producers of Paint Shop Pro, has recently released WebDraw 1.0, a new visual tool creating Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and animation. SVG is one of the newest XML standards for representing graphics and animations in an XML format. WebDraw allows you to use freehand tools to visually create graphics, and allows you to toggle back and forth to see the generated SVG code. SVG can be used to include visual elements inside of an XML document, which can then be transformed or further edited from within the XMLSPY environment. A free evaluation copy can be downloaded from www.jasc.com/products/webdraw/.

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe

Visual SourceSafe 6.0 is a widely used version control system for software development that is directly supported inside XMLSPY. The basic idea behind a version control system is that it enables development teams to protect and track the development of source code throughout the software lifecycle through a file-locking mechanism. This mechanism requires developers to check in and check out files from the repository, protecting files from accidental overwrite by preventing more than one user from modifying the same file at the same time. For more information on Microsoft Visual SourceSafe visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/ssafe/.

Jalindi Igloo

Jalindi Igloo is a software driver that allows XMLSPY to be used in conjunction with other version control systems, including the popular CVS revision control and repository system. For more information on Jalindi Igloo, visit www.jalindi.com/igloo/. To use XMLSPY with CVS, first install WinCVS on your computer and configure it properly to access your CVS repository. WinCVS is an open-source graphical user interface for CVS. For more information on WinCVS, visit www.wincvs.org/. Next install Jalindi Igloo, which enables the source control commands on the Project menu within XMLSPY and enables you to connect XMLSPY to a CVS repository for integrated check-in and check-out capabilities when you are working with your XML projects.

Apache Ant

Apache Ant is an open-source Java-based build tool that enables you to compile and archive your software application. It is functionally similar to other build tools like Make. Ant differs from other build tools in that it uses an XML-based configuration file, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. XMLSPY’s built-in Java code generation templates autogenerate an Apache Ant build file. For more information on Apache Ant, visit http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/.

Forte For Java (NetBeans)

Forte For Java, also known as Sun ONE Studio 4, is an integrated development environment for Java developers. It is based entirely on the open source NetBeans Tools Platform. Sun Microsystems recently released several new Java programming APIs, including the Java API for XML Parsing, the Java API for XML Binding, the Java API for XML Messaging, and the Java API for XML Registries, all of which are supported within the Forte For Java/NetBeans Java IDE. Furthermore, XMLSPY’s built-in Java code generation templates autogenerate a Forte For Java/NetBeans project file. To download the NetBeans IDE, visit www.netbeans.org/.

Apache AXIS

Apache AXIS is an open-source implementation of the SOAP protocol, which is a protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. Apache AXIS includes a SOAP server that can operate standalone or can plug into external Servlet engines such as Tomcat. It also includes various WSDL utilities. One of the WSDL utilities can autogenerate Java classes from WSDL files. This makes it ideal to use in conjunction with XMLSPY’s WSDL editor. For more information about Apache AXIS, visit http://xml.apache.org/axis/.

Global XML—XML Integration Workbench

Global XML has bundled XMLSPY 5 with its GoXML Transform product, which is a data transformation workbench and engine that enables mappings to and from XML. It has the capability to generate XML from a variety of data sources. For more information about the product bundling visit www.xmlglobal.com/prod/xmlworkbench/index.jsp .

Reliance Any2XML

Reliance’s Any2XML converts any unstructured text data to XML through the use of regular expressions for pattern matching to exact data, allowing you to convert data from different sources to XML. The Any2XML Developer Edition is available as a third-party plugin for XMLSPY. It enables you to import any text document directly into XMLSPY. For more information visit http://goreliance.com/downloads/any2xmlspyplugin .




The XMLSPY Handbook
The Official XMLSPY Handbook
ISBN: 764549642
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 121
Authors: Larry Kim

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