New release at the end of march

The first alpha of XPontus XML Editor 1.0.0 pre1 (End of March)

I've been working hard on XPontus for the last 6 months. It is very different than the previous versions in terms of usability and architecture. Now the software has more features and is more extensible. XPontus has plugins, XPath, an "immature" code completion, etc. Thank you everybody for the bugs reports, the tests and the suggestions. I'll release a new release candidate of 1.0.0 every month until I think that the software is enough stable. The stable version will be called 1.0.0(probably june).

I need to release, so I have to remove incomplete features :

• The plugins manager(the core of the application) : I was planning to have a complete plugins manager with auto-updates, dependency checking/autoselection, etc. I cannot achieve that goal in a small amount of time. To install a plugin the user must download it for now. I can add a version checking feature to notify the user that a new version is out, but that's it at least for now.
  
• Perspectives(Tree Editing, Text editing). Sometimes you want to edit an XML document in a simple window. But when your document is big, you might want to have some drag and drop(elements) features, cut and paste node quickly. I started implement perspectives in xpontus but it involved rewriting lots of code. The big issue with perspectives is how(or how often) you synchronize the text of the source view and other kind of views(Tree view, diagram view for example). I associated persectives to file content types(text/xml, text/xquery, etc.) and file modes(docbook, ant, etc.). When a document needs to be created, the perspective matching the document content type creates the appropriate view to display the document.
  

So what's the plan?

• Finish the plugins manager. Find a strategy to uninstall completely a plugin. I cannot do it when the application is running : I can unregister the plugin, but I am not able to delete the plugin installation directory.
• Ensure that the core features are working well : save, save as , print, validation, etc.
• Fix previous versions bugs
  
• Update code comments and write a developer guide
• Write the software's architecture manual
• Update the user's guide
• Release