XML is a convenient toolkit for web, e-commerce, and cross-platform portable applications.
In this article, we discuss some XML editors that will boost your efficiency with XML.
What is XML?
In XML, you can store your data and render the content for different devices. Many markup languages follow XML’s syntax with their own semantics, for example, HTML.
XML is used in web applications like Shopify when creating a product feed. Product feeds are the information about your store’s products, usually in XML format. XML files are sent to different merchants like Amazon and Google Shopping to synchronize with the platforms.
Since XML is essential in developing applications, most modern frameworks utilize XML for the data feed. When you have a large XML file, you need to edit it and perform calculations with it. XML Editors are the specialized tools for editing your XML files using DTD and different structures like schemas and trees.
In this article, you’ll find free, open-source, and premium license XML Editors.
Oxygen
Oxygen XML is a cross-platform editor developed in Java. It offers several features for editing XML documents like:
- Checking for proper XML form.
- Validating against schemas like DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron, NRL, and NVDL schemas.
Oxygen XML offers mainly three views designed for editing XML documents.
- Text view: Text view is the default view for editing an XML document.
- Grid view: Grid view formats your XML document in a spreadsheet-like style. In this view, the left-most column shows the elements, along with comments and processing instructions, at the root level, and the next column shows attributes of root elements and every unique first child of the root XML element.
- Author view: It provides a WYSIWYM(What You See is What You Mean) view for the XML. While editing in this view, the XML elements are human-friendly while still maintaining XML’s nesting and semantics.
Emacs for XML
Emacs is best known as a powerful text editor favored by UNIX developers. Emacs can work with XML in non-UNIX platforms such as Windows, MS-DOS, and macOS.
Various modes exist to edit XML:
- sgml-mode.el
- PSGML
- PSGMLx
- nXMLMode
- XML-poly
- xml-lite.el
- XML Authoring Environment (XAE)
- XSL-Mode
nXMLMode is the primary XML editing mode in Emacs. It supports schema-sensitive.
XML Notepad
XML Notepad is an open-source editor for XML . It has a tree view and XSL Output on the left pane and node text on the right. It has an error-debugging window at the bottom.
It comes up with an editable Tree View that comes up with updatable node names and values, updated in the node text view.
It supports IntelliSense for code completion and syntax errors. XPath expressions and XInclude are also included. The editor has good performance on large XML documents and has real-time XML schema validation. The editor also features an HTML viewer for viewing XSLT transformation output.
Liquid Studio
Liquid XML Studio IDE is a Windows-based XML editor and XML data binding toolkit. It features Graphical XML Schema Editor, Graphical JSON Schema Editor, Graphical XML editor, and DTD editor. It also includes a user interface extension to Microsoft Visual Studio through the Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program.
Stylus Studio
Stylus Studio is an IDE written in C++ for Extensible Markup Language ( XML ). It includes a proprietary license starting from $99. It allows a user to edit and transform XML documents, data such as electronic data interchange(EDI), CSV, and relational data. It includes XQuery Editing, XQuery Mapping, XQuery Debugging.
Stylus Studio includes three views for XML: Text View, Tree View, and Grid View. The tree view is used for code folding and syntax coloring. The tree view is useful when editing large XML files. Grid View is more useful when doing calculations where you can view your XML file in a spreadsheet.
Komodo
Komodo Edit has XML support besides HTML, Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, etc. It’s simple yet functional. Code completion is great, and the layout is uncluttered and intuitive. It features a paid version called Komodo IDE that includes features like unit testing, multiple workstation synchronization, and integration to GitHub and BitBucket.
Komodo also supports bookmarks and marks inspired by Emacs for setting bookmarks in a file.
Track changes allow you to undo the change. The tracker margin incorporates Source Code Control (SCC, IDE possibly) changes when the document is under revision. If the archive is in SCC, the tracker edge shows changes against the last submit.
Kate
The Kate source code editor features debug window, file explorer, and plugins. KTextEditor for editing color themes as provided by KSyntaxHighlighting. It has an option for viewing HTML sources, editing configuration files, and doing development tasks.
Kate has many plugins for XML. The XML validation plugin will check the XML file for warnings and errors, which will appear at the Kate window. Kate has another plugin called “XML Completion,” which checks whether the XML file follows the file’s DTD and verifies it. The plugin is based on libxmlcalled by the command xmllint.
NotePad ++
Notepad++ is a text source code editor with GPL License. It has good performance because it’s based on the editing component Scintilla and is based on C++. It supports syntax highlighting, code formatting, code folding, and minor autocompletion for programming, scripting, and markup languages.
It doesn’t, however, feature intelligent code completion or syntax checking. XML Tools Plugin is added to Notepad++ to support a set of useful tools for editing XML documents based on libXML2.
Go to Plugins -> Plugin Admin and search for “XML tools,” and install the plugin. The plugin provides XML, XSD, and DTD validation by checking for format and syntax. It supports the current XML Path and Xpath expression evaluation.
XML Grid.net
It is an online XML editor that provides different services such as:
- XML Sitemap Editor: You can edit your XML sitemaps from WordPress using the online tool. You can load from a URL or upload a file.
- Online XML To Text Converter : Convert XML documents into text files.
- Online XML Validator: Check and validate schema against DTD.
- XPath Editor: Create and evaluate XPath expression. It also lets you verify the paths.
It also provides conversion from XSD to XML, from XML to Excel JSON to XML. It features a JSON editor and viewer.
Adobe FrameMaker
Adobe FrameMaker is Adobe’s tool for XML and DITA. It contains a WYSIWYG editor for XML design for both beginners and professionals. It provides key shortcuts for navigating between DITA.
It has got beginners friendly structured views for nodes and attributes of XML data. It also provides easy embedding of Youtube videos, CSS3, markdown, and supports media files. It can also be used as a PDF editor by transforming XML to DITA content, which can be rendered as a PDF.
XMLSpy
XMLSpy is primarily marketed as a JSON and XML Editor. It has a built-in schema designer and editor. It includes Visual Studio And Eclipse integration. It has an XPath builder, validator, evaluator, and debugger.
It can also generate visual charts from XML data.
The special feature of XMLSpy is the SmartFix XML validation, which detects errors in XML and automatically applies correction upon your selection.
ExtendsClass
ExtendsClass is a free toolbox for developers. This tool allows you to compare XML nodes and visualize the semantic differences.
XML diff tool makes a semantic comparison, and it compares every attribute-value pair of objects. It compares each node according to its position in the arrays. It sorts and formats the XML strings to find the semantic differences instead of just the text ones.
Editix
Editix is a quality open-source XML editor with lots of features like XSLT Editor, Debugger, XQuery editor, grid editor, visual Schema Editor, and a lot more. The primary interface of this Editor is the global view. The manual is available here with screenshots.
They also have a free online tool for XPath tester on the latest version, they’ve also included a new option for building XML documents from JSON. You can build schema from an XML document using the W3C Schema editor.
They provide professional licenses ranging from $119 for Small businesses to enterprises. They also have an academic license starting from $39, for which if you’re a student, you can apply using your .edu email address.
Code Beautify
Codebeautify got plenty of tools, including an XML viewer that has a minimalistic interface. It is better suited for quick editing. You can load an XML file from a URL or browser. It generates the tree view for XML and lets you convert XML to JSON. It includes XML syntax validation and minification.
They also have an online XPath tester.
Online XML Tools
Online XML Tools is an online set of XML tools developed by browserling.com. You can prettify, minify, validate your XML document. You can convert XML to YAML, JSON TSV, Base64, CSV, and vise versa. The tool looks promising with its huge list of handy features like truncating over XML, working with XML and SQL, and visualize XML with other features as well.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of editors available for editing XML. When choosing the best XML editor for your development, you need to choose an option that fits your purpose. Decide whether you’re getting the editor for yourself that won’t break your bank or for your team, the features you need, and the time cost you’re willing to save.
Next, find out online IDEs for web application development.