General Information 4 Preface 5 Program 7 The Road to an XSLT / XQuery IDE

Most XSLT/XQuery tools provide editing and transformation support. Some provide also debugging and profiling support. However there is a lot more to do in order to have an XSLT/XQuery IDE similar with today’s Java IDEs for instance. oXygen started to walk on this road providing a number of advanced development features. An overview of the features that should be available in a modern XSLT/XQuery IDE and more details about the part of these features already implemented in oXygen will be presented. Checking for errors and error reporting When editing source code every developer needs to know whether or not his code contains errors, to see where these errors are and to get their descriptions so he can easily correct them. Checking the source for errors can be done on demand or it can be performed automatically (continuous validation). The continuous validation is important because it signals the error immediately when it appears thus the developer is already focused on that and can more easily correct it. The errors can be reported in a list or in a table but they can also be marked directly in the source text. Marking errors in the source text with visual error markers is useful especially when coupled with the automatic validation as the detected errors are located naturally on screen. It is important also to report as many errors as possible and do not stop after the first one. Sometimes the developer can choose to correct an error at a later time but if the error reporting stops on the first encountered error then he will not get any more feedback. To summarize, an IDE should provide support for continuous validation, visual error markers and it should report multiple errors. The validation should be performed in background and should not interrupt the user from editing.