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 Hans Muller's BlogDecember 2004 ArchivesYour Christmas shopping troubles are over: more than 40 Java Markup Language EditorsPosted by hansmuller on December 03, 2004 at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)A few weeks ago I published a quick roll-up of about 40 component libraries for Swing applications that we plan to include in the javadesktop.org Swing Depot . That blog produced a nice bunch of feedback about libraries I'd failed to note and so I published a follow up blog with a dozen more. Since then I've been pointed at another 25, so I hope to update the list again before too long. However in the interim I've fielded questions from customers and partners and colleagues about Java based tools for markup languages, notably UML, HTML, and XML. So I've put together a list of those, at least the ones I'm aware of. The list that follows strives for all the same high levels of journalistic integrity that my previous efforts have: Warning: in many cases I've lifted or crudely paraphrased vendor product descriptions in the list below, rather than craft my own pithy summary. It's not because I'm incapable of doing a good job of that, it's because I'm lazy and life is short. It's also worth pointing out that I'm not trying promote the relative merits of these applications, just their existence. As before, I'd appreciate pointers to products I've failed to include. HTML Browsers and Editors The Swing JEditorPane component provides extensible support for rendering and editing HTML4.0. Although it's quite capable, it's not intended to be sufficient for general purpose web browsing or for high fidelity HTML authoring. Even applications that apply JEditorPane to more modest tasks will still find that they need to create a composite panel that adds GUI elements like menus and toolbars for common operations. The HTML and XHTML components listed in this section are extensions, encapsulations, or replacements for JEditorPane that overcome these limitations. If you want to put your small business on the web, Yahoo! Small Business is your one stop shop for helping you get online, sell online, and market online through products and services including domain registration, hosting, ecommerce, and customer recruitment tools. SiteBuilder is a Yahoo Small Business product that enables a user to create, publish, and update a web site from within one of the most capable Swing applications we've seen in some time. It's a complete HTML authoring tool, with templates, clip art, drag-and-drop editing, and precise positioning and layout. Yahoo Site Builder was covered in Swing Sightings #21. [I used Google to translate this site into English so I may have missed some of the finer points.] Xpage Internet Studio is a complete web site authoring system. It supports direct manipulation style editing of HTML as well as publishing a complete site to your ISP. ICESoft has been building pure Java web rendering software for quite a long time. They now have three big products:
Javaio - WebWindow, Component Suite, JModeler Loads of very high level parts here, beginning with the WebWindow browser component. WebWindow is a small pure Java HTML viewer that's intended to take up the slack from Swing's JEditorPane. JModeler is a generic diagram editor for building modeling applications and the Javaio Component Suite includes components like JOutlookBar (this sort of thing is sometimes called an "accordion" control), JHelpView for JavaHelp, and JSlidePanel for animating panels in and out of view. Grand-Rapid Browser provides an extensive rendering & browsing environment based on accepted and opened standards. Beyond the browsing experience Grand-Rapid Browser offers an extensible architecture that can embed various tools in the same application. Sferyx JSyndrome HTMLEditor is a Java component suitable for use in any Java application or applet which needs HTML document authoring. JSyndrome was covered in Swing Sightings #14. With project SimplyHTML an application is built for working with text documents. Text documents are stored in HTML and CSS format, but the application is meant as a word processor rather than a code editor or web site builder. SimplyHTML was covered in Swing Sightings #12. The goal of the Browser component, org.jdesktop.jdic.browser, is to provide a simple AWT component which enables Java applications and applets to provide basic web browsing capability. The basic functionality includes creating browser windows, rendering web content, navigation, a basic history mechanism (back and forward), and progress notification. The JDIC browser component encapsulates the native browser's rendering panel (Mozilla Gecko or Internet Explorer). WebRenderer is Java component that encapsulates the native browser. It offers full multimedia support across platforms and most forms of web content including the latest HTML standards such as SSL. Most popular desktop platforms (and their browsers) are supported: Windows, Linux, OSX, Solaris and JDS. Clue Web Browser Components (WBC) is designed for desktop and server applications. Developed on top of the Java2 platform, Clue WBC takes full advantages of Java2's rich functionality and works seamlessly with the Java Foundation Class. Clue WBC also provides a rich set of APIs. The APIs have simple methods to set a web address or a HTML string for rendering. There are also sophisticated methods to control every aspect of the browser. With the nicely defined APIs, developers can design powerful applications quickly and easily. EditLive! for Java is an online XHTML authoring tool that empowers business users with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for creating and publishing web content. JWebEdixx is a HTML Editor Applet for developers. It enables the development of browser independent applications with advanced HTML editing capabilities. By using a XML configuration file, JWebEdixx is very customizable. Version 1.1 has many new features: table support, advanced javascript API and much more. There is also a bean version available for the integration in Swing applications. JWebDixx was covered in Swing Sightings #21. JXHTMLEditJXHTMLEDIT is a cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML/XHTML content authoring tool, a very small Java applet based on the Java 2 Platform. JXHTMLEDIT provides word processor-like user interface that allows to edit the document d irectly in the final form (as will be rendered). JXHTMLEDIT is flexible and could be used to easily integrate WYSIWYG authoring functionality into existing products or services. Applet is less than 90 KB, so it loads very quickly. Ekit is a free open source Java HTML editor applet and application. The Ekit standalone also allows for HTML to be loaded and saved, as well as serialized and saved as an RTF. XML Tools Some of the entries listed here were lifted from Free XML tools and software, a really helpful site maintained by Lars Marius Garshol. TIBCO TurboXML is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing and managing XML assets. With facilities for creating, validating, converting, and managing XML schemas, XML files and DTDs, TurboXML provides a best-of-class XML implementation platform that combines industry leading XML solutions (XML schema authoring, XML instance editing, and XML project management) into an simple and intuitive IDE. TurboXML, which is currently deployed in thousands of organizations around the world, is the first XML IDE to offer comprehensive support for the latest XML standard - the XML Schema Recommendation. TurbXML was covered in Swing Sightings #6. Exchanger from Cladonia is a very capabale XML editing tool. As they say on their web site: "it features schema-based editing, tag prompting, validation against a DTD, XML Schema*, RelaxNG, tree view and outliner for tag free editing, XPath and regular expression searches, schema conversion, XSLT and XSLFO transformations, comprehensive project management, an SVG viewer and conversion, easy SOAP invocations, and more." Exchanger was covered in Swing Sightings #20. <oXygen/> XML Editor & XSLT Debugger Comprehensive support for XML document editing, formatting and validation including a "content assistant", an XML outliner, and much more. <oXygen/> provides complete XSLT 2.0 support including editing, validating and debugging XSLT 2.0 stylesheets as well as transforming XML documents using XSLT 2.0 stylesheets. Additionally there'san XPath 2.0 evaluator, an XQuery Editor, WSDL Editor and SOAP Analyzer, SVG Viewer and many other features. <oXygen/> was covered in Swing Sightings #13. EditiX is a Swing based XML editor designed to help web authors and application programmers take advantage of the latest XML and XML-related technologies such as XSLT / FO and XSD Schema. EditiX provides users with an extensive range of XML functionality within a refined IDE that guides you with intelligent entry helpers. EditiX has realtime XPath location and syntax error detection. Helpers are also provided with context syntax popup supporting DTD, Schema and RelaxNG. EditiX supports multiple templates and project management. User can apply XSLT or FO Transformation and show the result with a dedicated view. All the process can be managed by shortcuts. EditiX includes default templates with XML, DTD, XHTML, and many more. EditiX was covered in Swing Sightings #21. XMLEspresso 4.0 is a full featured XML editor for creating and maintaining XML documents. It's available as an applet or an application. Protege-2000 is a tool which allows the user to, construct a domain ontology, customize data entry forms, enter data. It's also a a platform which can be extended with graphical widgets for tables, diagrams, animation components to access other knowledge-based systems embedded applications; it's a a library which other applications can use to access and display knowledge bases. X-Smiles is an XML browser developed in Java. It has a component-based architecture that allows it to run in many different UI environments. In addition, XML vocabularies are rendered by Java components, which can be plugged into the browser. XML documents can also be displayed by using XSLT to transform them into an already supported vocabulary. XPath Visualizer can be used to learn XPath and also debug XPath expressions. The visualizer can show an XML document in a tree view and then allows the user to execute an XPath expression against that document, and see which nodes were matched. Octopus is a simple Java-based Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) tool. It may connect to any JDBC data sources and perform transformations defined in an XML file. GenDoc is an open source XML editor for data-oriented applications which has a tree-view and a styled view. It has a plugin API that allows the editing of some elements to be customized for specific DTDs, and also allows publishing actions to be executed from the editor. GenDoc is based on the now defunct Merlot project, and was formerly known as GenDiapo. Xmloperator is a tree-based XML editor, which can make use of a DTD or a RELAX-NG schema to provide schema-driven editing. xmloperator is mainly suitable for data-oriented XML rather than document-oriented XML. The editor supports undo, and redo, comparison of documents, as well as conversion using XSLT. It is based on the Xerces-J XML parser and the Xalan-J XSLT engine. XmlWrite is a powerful XML/XSL editing/transformation enviroment. It features: syntax coloring, wizards and templates for xml/xsl files, clipbook libraries for XHTML, SVG, XSLT, and much more. An free open-source configurable and extensible XML editor. Among its many features: HTML preview with an XSLT stylesheet, multiple undo/redo, source code display, complete validation using Xerces, and much more. UML Tools A comprehensive list of UML tools, both Java and native, can be found on the Objects by Design web site. This list of standalone tools, doesn't include the products that are only available bundled with IDEs, like TogetherSoft.Poseidon for UML is a popular, fully-fledged UML CASE tool. It evolved from the open-source project ArgoUML and has turned it into a world class modeling tool. Today, it has the fastest growing user community and is famous for its superior usability. Poseidon for UML is delivered in several editions to meet the needs of different users. Poseidon for UML was covered in Swing Sightings #5. ArgoUML is the open source project behind Gentleware's Poseidon for UML product. ArgoUML is licensed under the BSD license which also allows extensions to be commercialized. ArgoUML was covered in: Swing Sightings #5. Visual Paradigm for UML (VP-UML) is a powerful, cross-platform and yet the most easy-to-use visual UML modeling and CASE tool. VP-UML provides software developers the cutting edge development platform to build quality applications faster, better and cheaper! It facilitates excellent interoperability with other UML CASE tools and most of the leading IDEs which excels your entire Model-Code-Deploy development process in this one-stop-shopping solution. Many current screenshots can be found here. Visual Paradigm was covered in Swing Sightings #8. Violet is a free UML editor written in Java and released under the GNU Public License. The author, Cay Horstman , who's a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science at San Jose State University, explained the origins of Violet like this: "I wrote Violet for my students who were overwhelmed by the functionality and/or price of Rational Rose, and it has since been popular with other students and instructors. I couldn't have done it without Swing. If you look inside the (GPL) source, you'll find a really nifty application of Swing long-term bean persistence." Kind words like that made more than one day over at Swing central. And in case you're wondering, VIOLET is the "Very Intuitive Object Layout Editing Tool". The Violet UML Editor was covered in: Swing Sightings #17. MagicDraw is a visual UML modeling and CASE tool with teamwork support. Designed for Business Analysts, Software Analysts, Programmers, QA Engineers, and Documentation Writers, this dynamic and versatile development tool facilitates analysis and design of Object Oriented (OO) systems and databases. It provides the industry's best code engineering mechanism (with full round-trip support for J2EE, C#, C++, CORBA IDL programming languages, .NET, XML Schema, WSDL), as well as database schema modeling, DDL generation and reverse engineering facilities. UMLet is an open-source lightweight Java tool for drawing UML diagrams. UMLet lets sketch diagrams quickly. You can export diagrams to eps, pdf, jpg, svg, and the system clipboard. You can also create your own custom graphical elements SILVERRUN ModelSphere is an exciting and unique modeling tool that combines many features, such as process modeling, data modeling and UML modeling, and provides a flexible model management environment. CodeLogic for Java is designed to allow developers to take advantage of its power directly from their favorite Integrated Development Environment (IDE). With plug-ins for Eclipse, JBuilder, JDeveloper and IntelliJ IDEA users to extend these IDEs with tools that will allow them to immediately gain insight and control over existing source code ArcStyler provides a comprehensive, architecture-driven solution for end-to-end model-driven development of modern, component-based applications. OptimalJ from Compuware accelerates J2EE development by generating working applications directly from visual models. Through the power of patterns and model-driven application design, OptimalJ decreases the need for extensive coding and design skills, and delivers high productivity and consistency. JUDE is a modeling tool which supports your object-oriented software designing in JavaTM and UML1.4(Unified Modeling Language). Aris UML Designer convers technical requirements into the standard modeling language UML, thus guaranteeing consistent, object-oriented modeling of all program functionalities. Visual CaseTM is a powerful AMD Tool for software development, database design and business analysis. Visual Case combines the UML modeling language, legacy diagrams and E/R (entity relationship) design tools with a round-trip database engineering tool and a sophisticated SQL editor in one integrated CASE tool. | |
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