I'm spending my holidays in Montreal. With my old laptop, I cannot use Eclipse or Netbeans, so I took few hours to learn emacs. I am satisfied with it : I can chat on IRC, play some music, commit to SVN, program without leaving emacs!

I am working on the users transformation profiles. There are still few bugs in there.




I will be working on the Outline Viewer soon. I have to rewrite the "Save action behaviour" and few other parts. There's still no window for the users settings. I wonder how I am going to implement it as almost everything is now a plugin in XPontus.

I plan to release a snapshot version of XPontus 1.0.0-pre1. XPath support has been added. Here is the development status.

The core IDE
Some basic text editing features are still missing.

• As I moved from local filesystem usage to commons-vfs for filesystem abstractions, you cannot save a document yet.
• Printing bugs present in 1.0.0-rc3 will be fixed. Some people reported that they can't print multiple pages. In Ubuntu to be able to print you have to downgrade your version of cups to 1.2.8(cups or java bug??).

Expression evaluator plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS)
The expression evaluator plugin allows you to use 3 engines to evaluate expression

• The xpath1 module is able to evaluate xpath 1.0 expressions
• The xpath2 module is able to evaluate xpath 1.0 expressions
• The xquery module is able to evaluate xquery expressions

Users transformations plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS few bugs)
It allows you to manage transformations profiles and execute them. The following engines are available :

• Xalan 2.7.0
• Saxon 6.5.4
• Saxon 8
• XQuery
• STX

Documentation generator plugin (READY)

• It supports generating documentation from DTDS or XML Schemas. It only supports single files.
• The XSL documentation generator plugin is not added yet. It depends on my other project Jxsltdoc.

Schema converter/generator plugin (READY)
The schema converter plugin allows you to generate/convert files into differents formats.
Supported formats are :

• DTD
• XML Schema
• Relax NG
• XML.

XPontus virtual file system plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS)
It allows the editor to open a local or remote files. It will support the following protocols :

• Local : to open files on a local hard drive
• Samba : to be able to open documents over a LAN
• SSH : to edit files located on a SSH server
• FTP
• HTTPS

XPontus themes plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS)
It allows you to use different look and feels for the editor : Windows look and feel, etc.

XPontus icons plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS)
It allows you to use a different icon theme

XPontus plugin's browser (WORK IN PROGRESS)
It allows you to install , remove, update or query available plugins

Validation plugin (READY)
It allows you to validate files. 3 sub-plugins are available for now

• Simple xml validation
• Batch XML validation
• External Schema validation

Lexer plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS)
The lexer plugin is responsible for syntax coloring. For now here is a XML and HTML lexer.

Completion plugin (WORK IN PROGRESS)
It will first be available for XML files which are constrained by a DTD or schema.

Well I am comparing XPontus 1.0.0-rc3 to the upcoming version to see what is missing or what should be improved.

I am working on the user's transformation plugin for XPontus. As the plugin must support different kinds of plugins(JAXP, etc.), I have to think again about it. Here is a mock-up of the interface.

Everything is going smooth lately. I am done with the Batch Validation plugin and the schema converter/generator plugin.
I will try to get most stuff ready for Christmas and release only a Java Web Start version of XPontus. That version will be called xpontus-snapshot-date. My last effort will be working on the code completion plugin to make it work without looking for performance. The xml outline plugin should also be there....

Simons says "Another coffee, another plugin, maybe another release..."

The Batch XML Validation plugin of XPontus is being worked on. It will be more flexible and efficient than the one implemented in the previous releases.

I am also working on the schema converter plugin

It's been a long time. I haven't coded for a while. Well I was having a look at Apache Felix, an OSGI framework. I already started writing the plugin architecture of XPontus using JPF. I can't drop JPF now, I have done some stuff with it and I don't have classloader or securitymanager issues with it. Apache Felix looks nice, but I'm not familiar with it yet.

I am done with few plugins and writing some others. Here is the Batch XML validation plugin mockup below. It's implemented as a menubar plugin