If you have the Enterprise edition of either XMLSpy 2006 or MapForce 2006, you'll be excited to know that the latest release (R3) now supports integration with Eclipse.

I've always liked XMLSpy, yet I've hated having to launch a separate editor outside of Eclipse. With R3, this is no longer a problem (same goes for mapping in MapForce 2006).

You can download the integration installers from the Altova website

I really wish all tools vendors would build on teh Eclipse platform. It would make life a whole lot easier.

Comments (Comment Moderation is enabled. Your comment will not appear until approved.)
Kola's Gravatar Rob Hi

They have actually had an Eclipse plugin for a long time now maybe 2 years or more - although its always been hard to find on the site and not well publicised
# Posted By Kola | 8/7/06 7:08 AM
Rob Brooks-Bilson's Gravatar Wow, never noticed that, and I've been using the suite now for about 6 months!
# Posted By Rob Brooks-Bilson | 8/7/06 8:32 PM
Atish's Gravatar Hi Rob,

We have an application built on the Eclipse platform. Does this mean that we can embed MapForce in our application?
# Posted By Atish | 8/23/06 6:10 PM
Rob Brooks-Bilson's Gravatar Hi Atish,

You'll have to contact Altova about that. They do have an embedable version of Mapforce, but I don't know the details/licensing around that.
# Posted By Rob Brooks-Bilson | 8/23/06 6:28 PM
Binil's Gravatar Hi,
Whats essentially the difference between XMLSpy and MapForce? I have a requirement here of having to convert 5-6 tables with different definitions from a database into a single specified XML format. Which of the two tools suits me better?
# Posted By Binil | 9/1/06 3:25 AM
Rob Brooks-Bilson's Gravatar XML Spy is more for creating and editing XML files, schema and DTD's, where as MapForce allows you to map from one format (DB, XML, File, EDI, etc) to another. In your case, sounds like you want to use MapForce. You can map from your database to XML, and have MapForce generate the Java or C# or c++ code to do the extraction and transformation. If you were mapping from one xml format to another, it wouild generate the necessary XSLT to do the transformation.
# Posted By Rob Brooks-Bilson | 9/1/06 7:26 AM
spycomponents's Gravatar You can make XMLSpy an even better product with PlugIns from spycomponents:

File Commander PRO: Simply add File Commander PRO to the XMLSpy IDE as PlugIn to enhance the usability of the application with things like reloading opened files on startup, a history of opened files, anotes tab and an integrated file explorer.

ValidatorBuddy: By adding ValidatorBuddy to XMLSpy you get instant access to the most popular validators directly in the application.

http://members.chello.at/spiffbase/spycomponents
# Posted By spycomponents | 9/9/06 2:34 PM



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