First off, it certainly isn’t the price. The issue there is with companies that deliberately remove functionality and choose which features you would pay more for. (Common practice I know, but something that irks.) Sometimes on client sites, it’s useful to have a freeware alternative, if you just want to do some non core thing quickly, rather than wake the sleeping beast of purchasing.

The “misguided clones� bit relates to the tools you do come across are other trying to be the next XML Spy (and why not, they are most successful), rather than say, adding some aspect of XML processing that Spy might not cover.

I may be reacting a little to the mindset you often find the corporate level. You’re doing XML? Oh then you’ll need to have XML Spy… XSLT? Oh, then surely the same people have something for that too. I did this. We were moving into a heavily XML and XSLT messaging space and I convinced management to kit out the team with the full Altova suite.

XML Spy is not light weight. Starting up, it used to near cripple the stock development machines my team was using (this was 3 or 4 years ago and yes, they were under specified). For me XML is light weight; it may not be backed up by a schema or XSD and may only be a fragment. And in our environment this was the norm. XML Spy did not seem friendly to this in such that a lot of the tooling was only appropriate to documents supported by a schema. Remove access this functionality and it’s a pretty big default editor for XML fragments.

But thinking back to the root, it’s not Spy that tainted it for me, it was StyleVision. I just could not get on with this tool at all. It took all the joy out of XSLT and also because it couldn’t map anything that didn’t have an XSD, it proved completely useless to the project at that time.

The Altova products have loads of functionality, likely the richest set. There may have even been some way to get them to work in the project environment we had, but they were not intuitive enough to be adopted by the team and essentially lay (and I believe still lie) dormant. It was never said, but I could feel the egg on my face and I guess I projected that on the tools. You know what they say about the bad workman!

Often though, you just simple light tools to do simple light weight tasks; a text editor that checks you’re well formed and can format, a simple way to invoke a style sheet and see the result.

I’m going to edit my post, because you’re right. I might even take another look at XML Spy.

@Jeff I got the bacon version, but the smoky patch version 30190f wouldn’t install.

Thanks for the comments.

Just curoius by what you mean here by this statement, “over bloated Altova tools and their misguided clones”? Perhaps, you can provide more detail as you don’t seem to be backing up this statement in any way besides talking about another product that doesn’t even compare to XMLSpy. I would like to know why you feel this way? Sounds to me as if you’re just put off by the price of the tool and not by the actual results. It’s too bad you feel this way, but XMLSpy is free to try out before you make any purchase. I would just like to know why you feel they have misguided you.