IBM Corp. this week at XML World in Ottawa announced four new XML tools for developers, available now from its alphaWorks Web site.
The tool enables developers to import existing Document Type Declarations into Visual DTD, as well as allows the creation of DTDs from existing XML documents.
IBM’s existing tools facilitate the creation and manipulation of DTDs, and this week’s additions to IBM’s tools address specific niche development issues. The new XML tools allow the creation, editing, converting and composing XML data from different sources so that the data may be exchanged and shared between different applications. The four XML tools released this week are Visual DTD, Visual XML Transformation, XML Generator and IBM XSL Trace.
- IBM Visual DTD is a visual tool for the creation and viewing of DTDs. Developers can now create DTD elements, attributes, entities, and notations in a visual environment.
- Visual XML Transformation allows the creation of a new XML document from existing XML documents through transformation. Transforming is the process of creating a common interface between two different DTDs for the exchange of information.
- XML Generator engine is able to create an XML file, or can be accessed via the Document Object Model (DOM) API. DTD authors can inspect randomly generated XML instances to quickly reveal correct and incorrect DTD writing practices.
- IBM XSL Trace application allows users to visually “step through” an XSL transformation script while highlighting the transformation rules as they are fired. An XSLTrace user can also view the XML source and the corresponding XML or HTML result in real time. This enables users to set and remove “break points” on the style sheet and source document, as well as highlight all source nodes processed by each style rule.