XML Editors

[ma shannon]

I,m looking into learning more about XML. I have seen XML Spy used by a friend and it looks to be a great product, but it is expensive for the purpose of just playing around.
Are there any good free or near-free editors that Ranchers are using. Hopefully, the product isn't more complicated than the XML standards.
Anyone have suggestions for good, easy to use Editor or Viewer?

[Corey McGlone]

Originally posted by ma shannon:
I,m looking into learning more about XML. I have seen XML Spy used by a friend and it looks to be a great product, but it is expensive for the purpose of just playing around.
Are there any good free or near-free editors that Ranchers are using. Hopefully, the product isn't more complicated than the XML standards.
Anyone have suggestions for good, easy to use Editor or Viewer?

Well, probably the cheapest XML editor (assuming your on Windows) would be Notepad. On *nix: vi, emacs, whatever suits your fancy. All you need to edit XML is a simple text editor.
Personally, as far as imple XML editing goes, I use UltraEdit. The license costs around $30 and it will do text highlighting for almost any language you can think of, from Assembly to JavaScript. It's a pretty simple editor and it's not designed specifically for XML, but I still find it useful and prefer to use it over bulkier products.
Corey

[Robert Double]

It all depends what you want functionality you want from an XML editor. Personally I use XMLSpy, it is very functionally rich and intuitive. Dont forget you can download a demo of it and play with it for a while.
There are lots of shareware and free xml editor around though. Try EditML 1.0, Peters XML Editor 1.1, Athens XML Editor, Easy XML, or Soft Lite ScriptWorx that provides a host of other file types to edit as well i.e. ASP, CSS etc.
You can probably find most of those applications on www.zdnet.com/downloads.
Hope that provides some useful info... and happy XML'ing

[Rick Salsa]

I'd recommend using just a plain editor (notepad, vi for unix) to start off. I've used XMLSpy and love it, but it can be a bit intimidating to new users. You'll spend more time learning the interface than XML.
Once you understand XML and can write it on your own, then look into an editor to save you some time.
Just my 2 cents ,
/rick
[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: rick salsa ]

[Scott Bain]

I have used Microsoft's free XML Notepad in my classes, and people seem to like it. I represents the XML structure as a tree of nodes, similar to the way folders are represented in Windows Explorer, which will also help you conceptualize XML as a "DOM tree".
It also keeps you from forgetting to close tags and the like.
For DTD or schema validation, its approach is rather weak, but for experimenting with data modeling in XML, and for learning in general, I like it.
It's free from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnxml/html/xmlpaddownload.asp

[Barry Andrews]

I have been using BEA's XML Editor. It was written in Java. It can be downloaded for free at http://developer.bea.com/do_login.jsp You have to register though. It comes with the xerces parser.

Barry