IT Pains: July 2013

Character of our team

Working with XML documents belongs to daily tasks when you are member of an integration team. We design "SOA" services (in apostrophes because of maturity of SOA governance) on IBM Websphere platform. We decided to improve our hammer - XML editor and began some evaluation. We evaluated following product versions: * Oxygen XML Editor 14.2 Enterprise edition, build 2013051016 * Altova XMLSpy Enterprise edition, version 2013 rel. 2

Results

Oxygen best fits our needs in most of criterions. In top needs Oxygen better in 4 cases (Altova only in 2 cases). List price (Oxygen EE €540 ($698), Altova EE €799) & internal support (for each tool there is a responsible person selected in our company. Altova's responsible person is from abroad) wins also Oxygen.
Following picture shows what features we see as most important

Below you can see what features is Oxygen better

Evaluation approach

We tried to compare about 25 criterion of both products and put marks to Excel (C, D columns - mark 1 is for best support - mark 5 for none support). Importance of each criterion were put to green columns by different colleagues (value 10 for critical feature, value 0 for not important feature).
Preview of evaluation excel sheet

XSD editor features

Oxygen is very strong editor with options oriented to source code (compared to Altova text like experience). Perfect support for refactoring and navigation among imported/included XML files (hold CTRL and point with mouse like in PLSQL developer). Oxygen is able to show annotations from imported/included XSD.

Altova is not able to show inherited annotations. Editing options enable basic code completion. Options are text oriented. Altova generates easier sample data (on the selected xsd. In Oxygen there must be specified path to xsd).