Version 9.0 of my favourite XSL IDE, Oxygen, was released yesterday. Of course, I downloaded and installed it as soon as I could, having waited for an upgrade since 8.2 came out, some six months ago. I’ve written about Oxygen before; it’s the first decent XSL IDE available for Linux, and the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve come to depend on it. See, what I especially like is the fact that I no longer need Microsoft Windows to do my XML/XSL work. Oxygen works very well in Debian/GNU Linux.

And now, it looks like I can finally re-evaluate my XML editor needs, too. So far, I’ve run XMetaL in wine, which kind of works except that right-clicking the workspace still crashes the program (but that’s fairly OK since I seldom need to right-click anything while writing). As most things in wine, it’s beta quality, no more.

Now, however, Oxygen 9.0 comes with a semi-WYSIWYG view, with CSS formatting and start- and end tag symbols, making it the first real alternative to running Windows software in wine. It is reasonably fast, too, from what I’ve seen so far, and certainly more stable than anything run in wine. You do need an official Sun Java JRE, though; it will complain if you use some of the Java replacements available for Linux, and it doesn’t work with the GNU libgcj Java Virtual Machine.

I’ll give it a more thorough test run within the next week or so, but I’m hoping that it can deliver what it promises.