Oxygen 9.0 Is Out

Version 9.0 of my favourite XSL IDE, Oxygen, was released yesterday. Of course, I downloaded and installed it as soon as I could, having waited for an upgrade since 8.2 came out, some six months ago. I've written about Oxygen before; it's the first decent XSL IDE available for Linux, and the more I've used it, the more I've come to depend on it. See, what I especially like is the fact that I no longer need Microsoft Windows to do my XML/XSL work. Oxygen works very well in Debian/GNU Linux.

And now, it looks like I can finally re-evaluate my XML editor needs, too. So far, I've run XMetaL in wine, which kind of works except that right-clicking the workspace still crashes the program (but that's fairly OK since I seldom need to right-click anything while writing). As most things in wine, it's beta quality, no more.

Now, however, Oxygen 9.0 comes with a semi-WYSIWYG view, with CSS formatting and start- and end tag symbols, making it the first real alternative to running Windows software in wine. It is reasonably fast, too, from what I've seen so far, and certainly more stable than anything run in wine. You do need an official Sun Java JRE, though; it will complain if you use some of the Java replacements available for Linux, and it doesn't work with the GNU libgcj Java Virtual Machine.

I'll give it a more thorough test run within the next week or so, but I'm hoping that it can deliver what it promises.

XMetaL 5

I've spent the last few days tinkering with an XMetaL authoring environment for a client. The XMetaL version is the latest, 5.0, which is actually a lot of fun, but unfortunately it means that I've been forced back to Windows. What's worse, it also means that I'm forced to develop in Microsoft's exceedingly bloated Visual Studio .Net, surely a punishment for a previous life.

It's beyond me to understand why JustSystems, the Japanese company that bought XMetaL from Blast Radius, insists on this dependency.

An XMetaL developer doesn't need all the bells, whistles, and bugs that is Visual Studio, he needs a reasonably flexible scripting environment, easy access to modifying CSS stylesheets, writing (XML-based) toolbars and customizations, as well as the occasional form or dialog.

The thing is, different developers have different preferences. While I do believe that there are people that actually like Visual Studio .Net, not all of us do. Maybe we prefer other languages, or maybe we believe that forcing us to use the same tool for everything just isn't the right way to go. After all, even if you own an 18-wheel truck, you don't use it to drive to the supermarket to buy groceries. You use a car or a bus or a bike. Something that doesn't get in the way.

Because that's what Visual Studio does. It gets in the way, and more so when all you want to do is to tweak a CSS stylesheet. And I haven't even mentioned how hard it has become to change the DTD and then recompile it and import it into your project.

And I won't, because my blood pressure is important to me.

So while XMetaL in its latest reincarnation is very nice, I still consider version 3.1 to be superior for a number of reasons, of which one important one (to me) is that I can run it in and wine and Linux.