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Integration Watch: Remember good tools at low cost?


By Andrew Binstock
October 1, 2008 — 

I’ve wanted to write a column for a long time about the myriad little software packages I use to make my life easier. Like most readers of this column, I suspect, I rely on lots of small, elegant utilities that take care of a task in a simple, efficient manner. I am a big fan of these “applets”—which would be the better term were it not already hijacked by other well-known technologies.

Once a chosen applet migrates into my permanent inventory of tools, I always send a contribution to the author—either the expected fee or, in the case of free software, a donation. A fun wiki would be the list of people’s top 10 such utilities for, say, encryption, to-do lists, contact management, video viewing and the like. The list for software development would include such items as Web page designers, test tools, reporting tools, project dashboards, defect identifiers, defect trackers and CI servers. Invariably, we would all discover that our prized to-do list manager, for example, is far inferior to another one we’ve never heard of.

In days of yore, most software development tools fit in one category: They were comparatively inexpensive and were sold by many small, specialized vendors. Articles such as “C compiler shootouts” were regular (and highly awaited) features of magazines such as Computer Language and, to a lesser extent, Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

Today, of course, tools are either free or terribly expensive; there is little middle ground. And there are very few small vendors of tools, with the notable exception of the components market for Windows applications—but those are more libraries than pure tools.

One vendor, however, that has persevered making great niche tools at remarkably approachable prices is Altova, which has put out a variety of interesting products for a long time. Its flagship product, XMLSpy, is the standard-setter for XML file editing. It facilitates editing using a variety of display formats; validates documents via schemas and DTDs (Document Type Definition); has built-in editors, debuggers and profilers for XSLT and XQuery; and offers the ability to access most major databases, parse OOXML files, and generate Java, C# and C++ code for XML manipulation. XMLSpy starts at US$149 and, depending on features, can reach $1,200. A steal.

Another major Altova package is MapForce, a visual (and command-line) environment for file conversion. You can map input records (XML, CSV, EDI, OOXML and WSDL definitions, among others) to new layouts and indicate what transformations need to be performed as the fields are resequenced into the new data formats. The visual interface allows you to drag and drop transformations from a bundled library and test the output in a sandbox environment that supports output validation. And to avoid relying on XSLT transformations done quasi-interpretively, MapForce generates code in C++, C# and Java that can use standard libraries such as MSXML or Xerces and integrate with leading IDEs. MapForce starts at $299 and runs to $1,200, depending on the feature set.

UModel, the final entry among Altova’s major products, is a UML modeling environment. Whereas typical IDE-bundled UML tools cover the basic five or so diagrams, UModel supports all 13 UML 2.1 diagrams plus Business Process Modeling Notation. It enables code generation in Java, C# and Visual Basic, with full support for bidirectional (diagram to code, code to diagram) synchronization. It can export the diagrams in EMF and .png formats, and generate basic documentation using them. Pricing is similar to that for the previous packages.

Altova offers other products that fill smaller niches. Three of them are StyleVision, which transforms XML into reports and documents via a GUI; DatabaseSpy, which interacts directly with any standard DBMS and lets you edit and transform fields, edit SQL, and import and export data—all visually; and DiffDog, my favorite diff utility, which can show changes in a file without being confused by its structure. For example, it can suppress comparisons of white space or tag prefixes. You can edit a file while running diff, and it will highlight differences in real time. And finally, you can run DiffDog on entire directories (for text, XML and binary comparisons).

Getting back to the pricing, I’ve explained the generally favorable terms, but in fact they’re better than I stated. For the price of any two products at the enterprise level (a total of just under $2,000) or two at the professional level (totaling just under $1,000), you can get all eight Altova products. So, they are even less expensive than they appear.

Altova brings back the days of high-quality, niche solutions at great price—an aspect of the tool market that has been missing far too long.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.


Related Search Term(s): modeling, XML, Altova


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