New Architect > Archives > 2002 > January > Programming Product Review

A Real XSLT Editor

By Kurt Cagle

I spend a lot of time working with XSLT. Until recently, I used Macromedia's HomeSite as my XSLT editor because I simply hadn't seen anything on the market that let me work easily with XSLT as a programming language. However, a friend of mine turned me onto Marrow Xselerator, and it became one of the few tools that's indispensible to me.

Xselerator is an XSLT Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which means, among other things, that it treats XSLT as a real programming language rather than yet another XML language. It has many of the same features that you'd expect in other, contemporary IDEs. For example, Xselerator includes drop-down selection of XSLT elements and attributes (along with HTML and the ability to add SVG, XSD, and other XML languages). This feature can radically speed up your development time. Configurable color-coding of elements helps you more easily see errors of transcription as well as sort out the welter of namespaces that can be embedded in XSLT. You can easily set the version of XSLT that's in use, including both the older Microsoft XSL Patterns language and the current W3C XSLT implementation, and the error checking and color-coding will change accordingly.

Xselerator 2.0 MarrowSoft www.m