In the last newsletter, I discussed a really powerful and free open source tool for manipulating XML content. Today, I have a commercial product that's in more-or-less the same space.

The product is Stylus Studio 2006 XML Enterprise Edition from DataDirect Technologies.

DataDirect could be accused of being overachievers - Stylus Studio is a smorgasbord of tools that provides:

* Numerous synchronized, visual XML editing views with the company's Sense:X, which provides intelligent XML editing, an Integrated XML Validator, and XML differencing.

* XSLT debugging, XSLT mapping, XSLT profiling, visual HTML-to-XSLT stylesheet design, and XSL:FO.

* Visual XQuery editing (Stylus Studio claims to be the first to market with this feature), XQuery mapping, and XQuery debugging.

* Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integration tools for converting, mapping and deploying advanced XML data integration applications for legacy EDIFACT and X12 data sources.

* XML Schema editing, validation, XSD documentation generation, and other XSD utilities

* A visual DTD editor, integrated DTD validator, and various DTD generation utilities.

* XPath 1.0/2.0 tools, which include XPath Evaluator, XPath Expression Generator, and the company's Sense:X for Xpath.

* Web services development tools including a Web Service Call Composer, and a UDDI Registry Browser.

* XML mapping tools that visually drag and drop data reformatting for XML documents, Web service data, relational data, and flat files.

* Import and export utilities for any file, XML and relational data formats.

* Tools to create XML views of relational databases and render relational data as XML.

* A JSP Editor, XML-Java debugger, and other tools to build XML-enabled Java applications.

* HTML/XHTML and Web design tools.

* Support for building XML-enabled Microsoft applications with MSXML, Microsoft .Net XML (System.XML), SQL Server 2000, and other XML-enabled products and APIs.

The user interface of the Integrated Development Environment is beautiful and there are three versions: Home ($99), Professional ($450), and Enterprise ($895).

This is a huge product and appears to cover perhaps the broadest selection of XML data manipulation abilities I've come across from a single vendor.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.