Whim

XML Editors: Cladonia Exchanger vs. SyncRO oXygen

I wanted an inexpensive XML Editor IDE for Linux (ideally for Windows and as plug-in to Eclipse, and doubly ideally for one license price).

DISCLAIMER: Below, I've written not a review, but taken some semi-organized notes.

If anyone reading has comments, questions, clarifications, I would definitely like to hear about all.

Minor UPDATE in "Comments" below... [Feb. 13, 2004]

Cladonia Exchanger, v. 1.2 is $98, or $45 non-profit
SyncRO oXygenXML, v. 3.0 is $74, or $48 non-profit.
One license lets you install to Linux or Windows; oXygen can also work as Eclipse plug-in.

Click on the two screenshots below to see full-screen.

Exchanger

oXygen

30-day trials, more screenshots at:
http://www.cladonia.com
http://www.oxygenxml.com

(One more I've not (yet) looked into is MyEclipseIDE.)

Conclusion First:
Well, if I really had to buy right now, I think Cladonia's Exchanger would provide me more useful functionality than oXygen, but, there are as always some tradeoffs.

Read the first few bullets under "NOT SO GOOD, COMPARISON" and "GOOD COMPARISON" for each product below to get the gist pretty quickly.

I know it's always kind of deadening to go through such a lot of info.
Briefest High Level Points:
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Exchanger is stronger in XPath; Schema viewing; and keeping main and outline views in synch (something I rank high). It also has some interesting other "services" (SOAP. SVG, etc. details below).
But - Exchanger cannot work too well with DTDs directly (I was disappointed). To get context-sensitive dropdown of valid elements (something I rank high), you can't use a DTD but must convert it to either a Schema or to the Exchanger proprietary concept of "named Type." Kind of odd; ah well.

oXygen creates v. nice HTML doc for your Schema; can work better with DTDs; can work as Eclipse plug-in; has better U/I generally.
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N O T E S

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Cladonia Exchanger = $45 (non-profit; $98 reg.)
(Like oXygen, one license per user, not OS. Buy once and run on Linux, Windows. Nice.)
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GOOD, COMPARISON

MAJOR
- XPath
Superior in Exchanger. Larger textarea box, for starters (more of the long Paths visible), but more importantly, clicking around in either the document or the outline keeps that XPath textarea updated. This is good. (XML Spy only lets you "calculate XPath" when you enter its modal dialog devoted to that. Exchanger's is nicer in that it's integrated into working with the document.)
oXygen has just about no automatic connection to the XPath textarea.
Both do have a dropdown button for "memory" of reusable recently executed XPaths.
- "Schema" View
Pretty interesting: you open not the Schema per se, but an XML document, and ask for the view of the Schema document it's using. (You can then ask for the Schema of the Schema...). Provides good navigation among "Globals," "Refers," and "Substitutions". Useful. (And yes, if you want, you can always simply open a Schema as a file, but this mechanism lets you skip that.)
Generally, it's fair to say that Exchanger Schema support (viewing, esp.) is far superior to Oygen. The latter provides typical text view of the .XSD document, and the usual Outline available in side pane. But Exchanger provides far more (as described just above).
(Do note that Oxygen can produce nice HTML documentation of your Schema, but right in the IDE is kind of hard to beat.) Also, note that although Oxygen has an attractive "Tree Editor," that doesn't really bring anything esp. useful to looking at an .XSD.
On the other hand, Oxygen does offer a nice button to get a browser-link, re: XSD, out to the W3C Spec, for any validation errors encountered in your XSD (e.g. auto connect to URLs like: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/#src-resolve ).
One more important note: Apparently the Exchanger "Schema Viewer" is also a FREE stand-alone product (they call it "service") offering: http://www.cladonia.com/schemaviewer/ (v. 0.5)

- Synchronizing between Outline and Main Edit works both ways (click and it synchs other pane).
- Outline is a little less elegant looking, but the fact you can, in Preferences, turn on "Show Attributes" means that the Outline in Exchanger can be much more useful than its counterpart in oXygen, where it's more attractive at a glance (elegant, narrower), but as it doesn't carry any attribute info, you are presented with a long list of "unlabelled," as it were, elements. (e.g. Exchanger shows: 'chunk id="passage4"' on top of 'chunk id="passage5"' and so on, while oXygen shows: 'chunk' on top of 'chunk' on top of 'chunk' and so on. You get the idea.)

- Also important to note are Exchanger's XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 support, though I'm not using these things.

MINOR
- Exchanger has "Viewer" view, which complements the "Editor" view, by providing the '+/-' sign convention for collapse/expand (as seen in IE presenting raw XML). oXygen lacks this, and you realize its value when you have large areas of XML to range over, and it's nice to be able to "move" some out of the way like this.
- Outline has handy "Collapse All" and "Expand All" buttons.
- Search Again (F3) does NOT synchronize between Main and Outline.
- The "Format" (indent) button took care of removing all the hard linebreaks that were in the book.xml document. This could be quite useful in certain situations...

GOOD, SINGULAR
MAJOR
- Has "Go to Start Tag" and "Go to End Tag" buttons. Useful.
MINOR
- Has immediate, top of right-click menu, Find (word cursor's on)
- Has "Select Element Content" and "Select Element" buttons. Useful.
- Has "Convert Characters to Entities", "Convert Entities to Characters", and "Strip Tags from Selection" buttons. Interesting, sometimes useful, I suppose.

NOT SO GOOD, COMPARISON

MAJOR
- Cannot use DTD for context-sensitive elements
(offers auto-convert to Schema, or "Type")
- Looking at a DTD only works in "Editor" mode; no color-coding even. (Exchanger requires well-formed XML to do much else (e.g. "Viewer" mode, Outline, etc.). This is fair (oXygen too shows DTDs simply as text file, though you do get color-coding).)
(For careful reading of DTDs, use LiveDTD or DTDParse anyway - converters to useful hyperlinked HTML.
http://www.sagehill.net/livedtd/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dtdparse/ (Whoops, my Perl modules lacking; sorry.)
/home/william/bin/livedtd-run
file:///home/william/schemata/dtd/ims_qtiasiv1p2p1/index.html
- Doesn't work/plugin to Eclipse
- No nifty "Schema Documentation" like Oxygen has.

MINOR
- Not getting Line Numbers (?) (though Preferences says I can set them. Hmmmm.)
( I submitted a Bug to SourceForge )
UPDATE: If you turn off "Soft Wrap Lines," then Line Numbers will work. They're working on making Line Numbers work regardless... (Nice responsive next-day e-mail to bug report :^)
- Doesn't provide "EOF/EOL" visible markers
- Bottom pane can't go away, and it's shortest height is too high
- Nothing re: "webdav" nor "ftp" in Help Search. Hmmm.
- Cannot 'Ctrl' click multiple files open (not a v. big deal)
- No "Close All Files" (not a big deal)

OTHER
- Also important to note (things I've not looked into): "Services" like SOAP; PIMnet; SVG; XHTML; Java Conduit. See: http://xngr.org/services.htm

- A "real" review (Oct. 2002) is at: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/web/2002/01590348.html.

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==================
OxygenXML = $48 (non-profit; $74 reg.)
(Like Exchanger, one license per user, not OS. Buy once and run on Linux, Windows, & Eclipse. Nice.)
==================

GOOD, COMPARISON

MAJOR
- CAN use DTD for context-sensitive elements
In fact, can even provide you context-sensitive elements list dropdown with NO schema, dtd, relaxng. How? It has a "Learn Structure" feature which automatically kicks in to provide you this editing assist. Quite nice. (It's also supposed to have a "Save Structure" to create a new file, but, this was not working for me.)
- DOES work/plugin to Eclipse
- Wow. "Schema Documenter" produces a beautiful, information-rich HTML page of your XSD, including (collapsible) "Schema Component Representation" and "XML Instance Representation" (code snippets).
- DOES provide "EOF/EOL" visible markers

MINOR
- CAN 'Ctrl' click multiple files open
- Has "Open File at Cursor" e.g., if there's a filename or URI in your file, put the cursor on it, right-click, and this opens that file. Nice.
- WebDAV and FTP features

GOOD, SINGULAR
- Tree Editor. Quite nice, separate app (separate window). Exchanger has an "Outliner" which (in the same IDE) permits some "editing/writing without messing with tags" like this oXygen Tree Editor does, but the Tree Editor is far more impressive, far more mature.

NOT SO GOOD, COMPARISON
MAJOR
- XPath use not as good as Exchanger (details above).
- Schema viewing not as good as Exchanger (details above).
- Does NOT synchronize between Outline and Main Edit both ways - only one: click in Outline to get synched in Main Edit. Would be nice to click in Main and get Outline to synch. Ah well.
- Outline is more elegant looking, but less useful. (See note above under Exchanger.)

MINOR
- No "Viewer" view (as in Exchanger) ('+/-' sign convention for collapse/expand (as seen in IE presenting raw XML).The utility in this is when you have large areas of XML to range over, and it's nice to be able to "move" some out of the way like this. Ah well; in oXygen you just cursor up and down all the XML in plain text editor kind of mode.
- Outline does NOT have handy "Collapse All" and "Expand All" buttons.
- Search Again (F3) does NOT synchronize between Main and Outline.
- Left pane can't go away, and it's shortest width is too wide.
- Did NOT remove all the hard linebreaks that were in the book.xml document. (The "Format" (indent) button)
Maybe you could make the case it shouldn't, but, I still think this could be quite useful in certain situations...

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BOTH
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COMPARABLE - NOT SO GOOD
- Not a show-stopper, but neither have the nice visuals for XML Schema as found in more focussed (and more expensive) products like Tibco ($270) (formerly extensibility) Turbo XML (visual = http://www.tibco.com/images/solutions/products/extensibility/schema_editing_screenshot.gif) or Altova's (Windows only) XML Spy ($400) (visual = http://www.xmlspy.com/images/shots/schema_view_tree.gif) [They have a "Home" version for $50 that does get you the XML Schema editor :^), but no XPath, no XSLT debugger, and many other things not :^( ]
[News (to me): If you want Windows on Linux, go to CodeWeavers.com and for $60 get CrossOver Office. Then you can run XML Spy on Linux. Hmmmph.]

COMPARABLE - O.K.
- Transformation Scenarios. Look to be pretty comparable. Exchange has XQuery; Oxygen I think doesn't. Oxygen lets you append a header or footer (from a URI) to your transform output.
- Converting Schemata. At a high level, both seem to offer a lot vis-a-vis Converting Schemata, one type to another. Exchanger also has concept of named "Types," which permits even more along these lines. Oxygen tells us it's using James Clark's Trang; don't know about Exchanger. (as with so much of this, you'll have to see the documentation, website, or product to understand more. sorry...)
- Both have "Find All" or "Find in Files," which put clickable links to all occurrences of word in a 2nd pane. oXygen has somewhat better context provided (line text, file, and line/col number). Exchanger 2nd panel info not quite as elegant context provided (line; file (full path; can be good, can be too verbose), and line (no col) number).
Exchanger makes this feature available only if you create a Project. (In both products, it's not available if you're searching on one file only (then you just get hit highlight, with F3 to "find again.")
Exchanger 2nd panel info not quite as elegant context provided (line; file (full path; can be good, can be too verbose), and line (no col) number).

MINOR
- Both have buggy Java (Swing?) menubar dropdowns that don't permit another application's window to which you change the focus, to paint over the dropdown. You have to go back to Exchange or oXygen and click somewhere else to close the dropdown, then you can go back to your other window.
- Presentation of error messages on validation are comparable, but I think I prefer Exchange's (oXygen's is a bit slicker, ease of getting about in them, but you have to click more to read full message. Exchange's plainer, fuller, right there. A matter of taste, etc.)
- Presentation of Find In Files uses same pane and functionality. In this case I find I prefer oXygen's better controls; Exchanger lacks even a horizontal scrollbar to read overly wide info, or resizable columns.

Posted by William in category: Web at January 26, 2004 05:53 PM