eclipse web tools
platform project
Jens Lukowski Contributions
This project proposal is in the Proposal Phase and is posted here to solicit additional project participation and ways the project can be leveraged from the Eclipse membership-at-large. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.webtools newsgroup or the wtp-proposal mailing list.

Introduction

The eclipse Web Tools Platform Project aims to extend the eclipse tool integration platform with plug-ins that support the development of web applications. One important standard of web development is XML. The subject of this contribution is the open source X-Men project, a XML plugin for Eclipse, for the initial code base of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project. The X-Men code base is released under an Eclipse compatible license (CPL).

Description of the Contribution

The X-Men project provides a set of tools that are useful to XML developers to perform their common tasks. These include:

    • Source View
    • Table View
All views handle well formed XML as well as malformed XML.

In the following sections I provide some detail about these contributions.

Source View

This view supports syntax highlighting, content assist (based on DTDs and XSDs), highlighting of the corresponding tag and an instant updating outline view.

Figure 1: Source View with corresponding tag highlighting
Figure 1:

Table View

Sometimes, especially with large XML documents, the source view isn't the right tool to view XML. You need a view more adapted to the hierarchical structure of XML. The table view provides such a tool.

Figure 2: Table View
Figure 2:

Summary

The X-Men contribution will complete the XML development tools and also provide a point for discussion and alternative ways of achieving the goals with different design decisions.