Project Plan For , version 1.1

Introduction

The Visual Editor for XML is a set of plug-ins that provide WYSIWYM editing ability for XML files, regardless of the XML involved. Vex uses CSS stylesheets to provide the formatting for the presentation layer. All that is needed is a stylesheet and an appropriate XML file to edit. It hides the XML tags from the users, allows them to have a word processor like experience but store the information in the native XML format.
Vex is based off of a contribution from the original Vex project created by John Krasnay and hosted at sourceforge.net. In the year 2008 this code was donated to Eclipse and has been an Eclipse Web Tools Incubator component. In 2011, the project moved under the hoods of the Mylyn Docs project.

Release Deliverables

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Release Milestones

1.0.0 M32010-11-18
1.0.0 M42010-12-13
1.0.0 M62011-03-15
1.0.0 M72011-05-03
1.0.0 M82012-01-04
1.0.0 M92012-05-29
1.0.02012-09-09
1.1.0 M12013-01-29
1.1.02013-09

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Target Environments

  • Java 5 or later.
  • Eclipse 3.5 or a later release of the Eclipse 3 line.
  • Eclipse 4 already seems to work, will be fully supported in the future.

Internationalization

Only English translation files, however all strings are externalized for translation in a future release.

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Compatibility with Previous Releases

Versions prior to 1.0.0 M8 used other package names (org.eclipse.wtp.vex.*). Older plug-in descriptors and customizations have to be converted manually to use the new package names (org.eclipse.vex.*).

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Themes and Priorities

Full support of the XML infoset

  • Committed
    • Comments
    • Processing Instructions

Support for common XML specifications

  • Committed
    • XML Inclusions

Support for common XML document types

  • Committed
    Support for
    • Docbook
    • DITA
    • XHTML
  • Proposed
    Support for
    • PI-Mod

API stabilization

  • Committed
    The VexWidget should be usable as standalone widget for structured text (not necessarily XML). An example will be provided, which uses the VexWidget for editing WikiText.

Usability

  • Committed
    One of the main "unique selling points" of Vex is to provide a text processor like user interface for XML documents.

Building a community

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