XML Development Pt. I

Folowing up from my last post about XML and XSL StyleSheets, I've ventured the net in search of the best XML Development tools or IDE. I've so far tested a few of them. Open Source and commercial products. Among the products I've tinkered and will be tinkering with are:

Stylus Studio XMLSpy CookTop 2.5 Amaya

The last two are Open Source products. XMLSpy 2005 Home Edition is free, though not open source. Of the four, I like Stylus Studio the most. Why so? Perhaps, mainly because of its' documentation and tutorials. Not forgetting, its well designed development environment (IDE) that also comes with the tool tip assistant, which they call Sense:X intelligent editing. I'm currently in the midst of going through the examples that comes with the product. All I can say, I'm getting the hang of all these XML, XSLT, XPath, etc. thingy. Amaya, on the other hand, is not only a tool to develop XML stuff. It is also a browser. A very advance browser I might say. I say this, because it's developed to support a whole lot of the W3C technologies. As mentioned in their web site:

.. to showcase Web technologies in a fully-featured Web client. The main motivation for developing Amaya was to provide a framework that can integrate as many W3C technologies as possible. It is used to demonstrate these technologies in action ..

Among the technology already supported by the product: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, many CSS 2 features, collaborative annotations and SVG support (transformation, transparency, and SMIL animation on OpenGL platforms). Of all the technologies supported by Amaya, I'm really impressed with the Annotea. Here's what it looks like: Imagine, putting comments and annotations on a specific web site and sharing them with everyone. Hmmmm.. interesting way of making comments to a blog eh. Pretty cool stuff, this Amaya. and did I mention? It's Open Source. Speaking of Annotea, there is a Mozilla implementation of Annotea for Mozilla and FireFox browsers named Annozilla, still in Beta. If you're interested, get it. FireFox uses, however will only be able to view the annotations. Ok. Looks like that's all the time I have right now. Will be covering the other products in another posting.