Introduction

For many Desktop and JEE projects its necessary to write and test the XPath expressions. With the integrated features of Eclipse as IDE, the XPath Workbook plugin will enable developers to be able to write the XPath with auto-complete feature and test the XPath for the results.

This plugin can be easily plugged into any of the AJAX and SOA IDEs, so that developers can take advantage of the Eclipse as IDE. Namespaces are also taken care in the plugin.

Details

XPath Workbench is organized into two plugins. The plugin "com.sciology.xpathutility" consists of the View, Content assist, and XML utilities. The plugin "com.sciology.xpathutility.library" consists of all the required libraries. You need to download the two plugins into eclipse and you are ready to work on the XPath Workbook. This plugin is extremely useful for the developers who works a lot on the XML and XPath.

The motivation for this plugin is that there are no FREE plugins for eclipse which enables the user to work with XPath and also take care of the XML Namespaces.

Future Enhancements

• The XML Source view need to be connected to the XML Editor
• The auto completion need to suggest even the XPath functions
• Testing and certification on multiple platforms

Note

As of 2/23/2009 this plugin is tested only on the Windows, JRE 1.5 and 1.6 with Eclipse 3.5.x. On the Eclipse release 3.4.x and 3.2.x, this plugin might act very interestingly and might throw a Verification exception. This might looks something like... (java.lang.VerifyError: (class: com/sciology/xpathutility/view/XMLUtilities, method: evaluateXPathDOM signature: (Ljava/io/Reader;Ljava/lang/String;)Lorg/w3c/dom/NodeList;) Incompatible object argument for function call).

This is being planned to be fixed in later versions.