Last friday I’ve learnt how to write a XSD using XMLSpy. While I’ve
learned it at school, it wasn’t because teacher taught me about it:
She was still explaining ‘What is XML’, when I opened XMLSpy and
w3.org primer on XSD. It didn’t took long before I figured out
how it worked. In fact, I haven’t read past section 2.1. By that
time, I had realized how nice it was, except that XMLSpy doesn’t seem
to let you set a type of a element via the graphical editor (at least
in the version I’ve tried, XMLSpy 5 Home Edition): you need to set the
element type by hand.

Then I did remember about a chat with Paul, where he mentioned that he
was writing XML documents using XSD as the ‘source’ for the document
format definition, and send him an email asking about it. He
said to be very disappointed with me, because I hadn’t rewritten
XMLSpy while the teacher was starting. :) I told him it would not be a
problem as long as I had Kiwi and Glade with me, but that wasn’t the
case (90% of the desktops in university still run Windows, on a Novell
network, and the remaining 10% are dual boot, with Windows and Red Hat
8).

So, Paul recommended me looking at <oXygen/> and RelaxNG (spelled
relax-en-gee), which seems to be what he’s been using lately. He also
told me about Morphon, which seems to have been turned on a free
license. The downside (for me) is that Morphon seems to be
java-based. On a quick look looks like oXygen is best, having support
for RelaxNG, and being able to be run as an Eclipse plugin. It also
looks like its able to convert from XSD to RelaxNG and forth. Pretty
impressive list of features they have there.

Lastly, all this discussion reminded me that I need to try Eclipse
someday soon, as everyone seems to be talking good about it.