Chapter 1: Introduction

What is xmlHack? And why do we need yet another XML editor?

xmlHack is first and foremost a text editor specifically for XML documents. It arose during the initial development of xmlDraft (SysOnyx Inc.'s XML Schema editor). I was doing more and more XML editing on all sorts of different machines. These XML documents were results of stylesheet transformations, so they were never very nicely formatted. Remembering that xmlDraft has an algorithm for formatting XML, I stripped out that code and put it into a simple application dubbed xmlFormatter. All it did was open a file and had a button to format the XML, and could also save the file back out.

I started using xmlFormatter quite a bit in my day-to-day work and for the most part just for, well, formatting. I was still using UltraEdit (a high-powered text editor) for my normal XML editing, but I was finding UltraEdit to be a little lacking. I really wanted some simple, common features to be applied to my XML documents, such as syntax highlighting. After a while of this, I started thinking that a good XML Text Editor is what I really needed, that did both syntax highlighting and well-formatting. Looking on the web, I wasn't able to find any real simple editors. All the ones I found were either really rather bloated or written in Java (which we all know is slow in GUI form). They had a lot of "features", but none of these features was what I was really looking for, and in fact most of these features for the most part really bloated down the application, making the initial load up take a long time (showing a splash screen, loading libraries of stuff I never used, etc).

Looking at the text editor found within xmlDraft, and thinking of the "features" I wanted to put into that editor but hadn't done so yet, I decided to pull that editor component out into it's own application, finish these said features, and see if anyone else would be interested. And thus xmlHack was born.

As you will read, xmlHack is first and an Editor, plain and simple. Editing text is what XML is all about anyways, and thus xmlHack let's you hack 'n slash away at your files without getting in your way.

So, read on and learn the gory details where xmlHack came from, what it wants to do, and where it's going.