Rise and Fall: Writing an XSLT Editor - Part 4

CoherentWeb, the XSLT-based Integrated Batch-Processing Environment (IBPE) is now no longer being marketed, though it will continue in private development in the hope of resurrecting it some time in future. This was not a difficult decision:

Though this product was carefully placed to complement conventional IDEs rather than compete with them, it seems clear that the market-strength of the major IDEs make the IBPE concept non-viable as a commerical proposition, at least for a microISV startup.

I still believe earnestly that something is needed to fill the gap between the editing focussed IDEs and the processing focussed back-end systems. Few developers can realistically develop XSLT against a single XML instance and yet this is the way IDEs present the environment, one input, one output. Sure, they let you batch-process a folder but how many of them have these features?

Multi-threaded batch-processing
Seamless presentation of output alongside each each input
Summary reports of all outputs
Real-Time update of batch progress
Instant cancellation of a batch-job
Background clearing of previous batch-jobs
Single-Click reviewing
Management of linked resources such as graphics
Zip-Package creation

The answer is of course none of them. This doesn't make XSLT IDEs bad tools of course (far from it), it simply means that something else is required, something that can cope with a few dozen or a few hundred inputs and manage all the associated resource files.

So, along with the demise of CoherentWeb, the XSLT editor integrated into this tool is also very likely doomed. This introduced a range of features new to XSLT. Most popular of course was virtual formatting (mentioned in several other blogs), which would almost eliminate the need for xsl:text elements, if only other XSLT editors were to adopt this.

But there were many other new features also: the XPath manager with full predicate-by-predicate tracing, the literal result elements validation of static XSLT, the schema-scanner for schema-set based validation. I hope at least some of these features appear soon in the current (and otherwise excellent) crop of XSLT editors available. So even if CoherentWeb is dead, some ideas from it may live on.

There are some promising signs in the XSLT IDE sector, some products appear to be shedding their more peripheral XML authoring features, to provide a more focussed UI for the developer, this has got to be a good thing. This should give us simpler toolbars and less distraction from features we don't need, hopefully more will follow.

One last screenshot of CoherentWeb for the sake of nostalgia: