<XMLToday/>

Published originally on 2010-07-23.

Yesterday, a tweet, from @jirkakosek, reminded me that I needed to mention a recent bit of work I got done using the impressive oXygenXML XML editor.

Over the later part of last year and early part of this year I had collated a series of small recipes I had been gathering for a modest little book (Ant Recipes for Web Developers). These recipes were just simple little snippets of how to subvert Apache Ant to do common web related software development tasks. I thought that with me spending most of my time on XProc I had to 'clear the decks' with previous technologies ... I had used Apache Ant for many years for many of the things that XProc is purpose built to do.

Anyhow, having done a bit of writing work across a number of articles & books (technical reviewing, authoring, co-authoring) with the usual publishers, I thought this time around I would opt to self publish and learn how to make a book.

Now having gone through the process of making a book, I would not recommend doing so unless you are prepared to make some serious compromises in terms of the final quality of a book published this way. There is just too much to do in terms of checking, editing, and all the things that go into making a book for a single person to manage ... either you need lots of time or money (or both).

Using oXygenXML, to edit my original docbook source and derive the format that the self publisher needed, however was a complete success. Normally I have used emacs to write documentation I felt a little trepidation using oXygenXML as a primary authoring tool ... oXygenXML tends to be the tool I use to generate/debug a lot of xslt and xquery code and to clean up xml not author documentation.

But once I opened my very large docbook with oXygenXML I never looked back:

• felt comfortable using the 'author' view for long stretches of text and could switch between text and source code all in a single editor
• run apache ant source code using external tools
• do all the things I needed from a word editor that was xml aware
• link up to web services, xml databases which comprised some of the 'Ant Recipes' examples
• subversion integration
• derive source code download from docbook definition
• derive PDF draft versions and custom text versions from docbook source

There is something liberating about using a single editor to write documentation as well as test/debug/execute related source code ... it meant that my source code was more likely to stay in sync with what I was writing about. The other obvious advantage was time saved from not having to switch between a lot of different tools.

I also still feel that I have yet to really use all the features of oXygenXML, especially when the oXygenXML dev team keeps pumping out useful features.

Being a long time emacs user, its rare for me to consider using anything else and I just wanted to say thanks to George Bina and the oXygenXML dev team for making an editor that is everything you need when it comes to working with XML, I would highly recommend others to try it out.

Disclaimer: As I am a member of a few open source dev efforts (eXistdb, xproc impl, etc) I regularly receive test licenses from many of the XML IDE folks: the oXygenXML team provided me with a test license this year to try out a few of the more advanced features. That being said, I have purchased oXygenXML in the past.