Introduction
Often XSLT is used in a background process. For example, transforming an XML document into an HTML page. The process used to write an XSLT document, at least for me, was to write the XSLT in a text editor, save it to a server, and then run the page to see if it transformed correctly. This is a very tedious process if one is just learning XSLT. Most commercial XSLT editor / IDEs are rather expensive, especially if you are an individual just trying to learn XML / XSLT.
Target Audience
If you just got back from Barnes and Noble with your spankin new XSLT book, and are bummed out because it didn't come with anything for you to run the examples with - here you go.
Treebeard will also fill the need for small business' who are just getting started with XML/XSLT, are on a tight budget, or don't quite need a full featured IDE.
Thanks
Treebeard would not be possible without the following projects:
Special Thanks to Sal Mangano for giving treebeard a mention in his O'Reilly book XSLT Cookbook which has a some really cool information on XMI, code generation, and some all around good tips
Treebeard's Features
- Syntax highlighting
- Code Completion
- Template browser
- Simple path builder
- Plug-able XSLT transformer
- Load files from a URL
- Installer for most platforms
- OS independent
- Output in HTML, text, or PDF
- Find with regular expression support
- XML tree view or plain text view
- Bundled with Xerces2-J, Xalan2-J, and Saxon
- Apache FOP with Preveiw & PDF saving
- UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO-8859-1 support
XSLT Transformer Support
Treebeard has been used successfully with the Saxon, jd, Xalan, and Oracle transformer (listed in no order).
Treebeard is Great, but I Need More
Alas, if you need to have company backing (someone to yell at if the program breaks), multi-programming language support, or you have just plain out grown Treebeard (no pun intended), the following are some programs that might fill your needs (note all of these have the "edit one file at a time" interface):
The JEdit project is a very cool IDE (in fact Treebeard's syntax highlighting is based on JEdit code). JEdit has the same type of transforming as most commercial IDEs, and is free. Netbeans also does XSL Transformations in the "standard" way, and is also free.
There are several non-free xslt editors / IDEs out there. Here are a few: Oxygen, Xselerator, Komodo, eXcelon - these are in no order, and I don't like any of them (hence Treebeard...)