xmlhack: JAXE, a new document oriented XML editor

Damien Guillaume has published JAXE, a new XML editor, written in Java and published under the GPL, for users who want something more than "yet another XML editor with a tree interface".

Editing document is done -- as you would guess -- in text mode, with the start and end element tags being displayed differently for block and in-line elements.

The very straightforward user interface is built on two menu bars: a generic menu bar giving access to File, Edit and View menus and a specific menu bar for each document type.

The definition of a document type is done through an XML configuration document. In addition to defining the specific menu bar, this configuration gives the location of a W3C XML Schema instance (October 2000 CR in the current version) and an XSLT transform to visualize the document as HTML.

JAXE is also extensible through defining Java classes called when elements are added.

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Re: JAXE, a new document oriented XML editor (Daniel Schneider - 12:00, 17 May 2002)

I could yes, here are a few comments (disclaimer: did not spend time testing it really).

Installed under Unix / Solaris with Java1.3 and also Win2000 with Java1.3. Seems to work fine. It's just an archive that you decompress. You may want to edit the run.bat or run.sh files to tell your system which java to use.

User adds tags via menus (as described above) and that are defined in a config file. By default you get a schema for education (quite rich) and alternatively XHTML (subset maybe). Doing your own is easy (there is menu to switch between doc types)

Missing IMHO: a contextual menu like in Emacs/PSGML or Framemaker. You have to use the menus. At least you get some minimal feedback on allowable elements and also where the element you tried is allowd if you do it wrong (maybe you need to understand a little french, don't know if the code localizes).

If you are willing to edit a little XML to get the menus for your XSD (it does not read DTDs I believe) and don't have the cash for an expensive product and hate tree editors and are afraid of emacs it's a good thing to try. It's probably quite student friendly :)