SyncRO Soft has released version 2.0.4 of
oXygen XML Editor, adding, among other
new features, initial support for validated editing against Relax
NG schemas. But that initial support has some
shortcomings that make it of limited value in its current
state.
The oXygen site provides the following description of the newly
added support:
Content completion driven by
Relax NG Schemas. When editing documents associated with a
Relax NG schema the editor will offer content completion
proposals for elements and attributes.
But there are a couple of serious shortcomings in the
"content-completion proposals" it provides in its Relax
NG-driven mode:
-
its Relax NG-driven element completion is currently
schema-sensitive but not context-sensitive -- meaning
that, instead of presenting you with a list of just the
elements that the schema says are valid at whatever point
you're at in the structure of the document, it gives you
list of every element in the schema, so does nothing to
help or prevent you from inserting an element that may
not be valid at that point in the document structure
-
in its Relax NG-driven mode, it does not do completion on
enumerated attribute values, so does nothing to help you
select a valid value, or prevent you from inserting an
invalid value
Neither of those limitations exist when using oXygen in its
DTD-driven mode, so hopefully there are plans to enhance the
Relax NG context-sensitive completion in future releases (hard
to know, though, since the oXygen site provides no "TODO" list
of potential features planned for upcoming releases).
Excessive memory footprint
Another serious shortcoming in oXygen is its seemingly
unbounded appetite for system memory.
To be fair, it should be noted that resource-hogging is a
standard trait of just about every Java-based XML editor out
there. But oXygen takes it to a whole new level. Its initial
memory footprint is huge by any standard, and appears to continue to
bloat as long as the application remains open -- it seems to
take as much memory as it can get, but rarely gives any of it
back to the system.
Features
Outside of those shortcomings, oXygen does provide a number of
decent features, including:
-
search-and-replace support using Perl 5
regular-expression syntax
-
XML Catalog support
-
configurable syntax highlighting
-
configurable indentation of content
-
integrated XSLT transformation support
If SyncRO Soft can add complete Relax NG support
while somehow managing to find a way to prevent oXygen from
gobbling up so much system memory, it could
eventually prove to be a usable editor. In the mean time, if
you want to do Relax NG-driven context-sensitive validated
editing, you might give
nxml mode for GNU Emacs a try.
A single-user license for oXygen XML Editor is US $48 for
academic use, $74 for non-academic use, with some quantity
discounts available (see the
oXygen license page for more details). A
free 30-day evaluation license is also available.
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