IDE for XSLT stylesheets

Question

What is the best IDE for creating and debugging complex XSLT stylesheets?

For debugging, the ability to set breakpoints and step through the source would be great.

I am interested in all options both commercial and free.

Answer 1

I got a recommendation from someone here for Altova XMLSpy, and it was pretty nice for the few days I used it.

Answer 2

I use Visual Studio. It lets you set breakpoints (conditional or otherwise) and establish watches on whatever XPath expression you can come up with. It also supports XSLT right out the box and colours it differently than regular XML so developing in it is very easy.

Answer 3

I recommend Liquid Studio.

For XSLT transformations you can even go for their quite functional Community Edition. It lacks many features present in commercial editions like:

• Diagram View
• Graphical View
• Web Services Tools
• XPath Tools
• Debuggers
• Refactoring
• XML Schema Documentation and XML Document Generator
• Visual Studio Extension
• XML Differencing, etc.

BUT still Community Edition is cool enough as an editor for XML (WSDL, XSLT, XQuery, DTD, CSS, XDR, XML Schema, JSON) with:

• Autocompletion (based on schema)
• Code colouring
• Collapsible sections
• Spellchecker (grammar and XML validation)

Community edition also starts as a 15-days trial so you can evaluate those paid features before deciding on edition.

If you really need XSLT debugging then your option would be XML Editor Edition. Though Community Edition still allows for smooth transformations while being able to work with source, target and style files in the same IDE.

You can find more details here.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Editors worth checking out:

• Visual Studio
• Altova's StyleVision/XMLSpy
• Oxygen
• StylusStudio

All have their specific advantages, so just check them out. If you already have Visual Studio, I'd suggest you just getting started with this one.

Answer 5

XML Spy is the best I've used, without question. But it's very expensive.

I think XSLT debugging and single-stepping is really overrated. Granted, when I started using XSLT there were no debuggers, so I might just be identifying with my torturers here. But the same things that make writing XSLT often feel as difficult as driving a car while wearing a straitjacket (e.g., variables don't) also make using a debugger not a whole lot more useful than the insert-print-statement paradigm.

Answer 6

I've been happy with using XML Cooktop for light XSL development. It's free and has been fairly reliable for me.