I'm at Sun's India Engineering Center in Bangalore since the past 10 days or so. I've come here for an internship project offered by Sun under the mentorship of Rohan Ranade. I am working on a project focused on improving the XML editor in Netbeans IDE, the primary goal being adding schema/DTD aware hyperlinking support to the editor. In layman terms, what that means, is to allow a developer to click on an element or attribute's name in his XML document and be taken (..or jump) to the corresponding schema or DTD definition.


To give a little perspective about the requirement of such a feature, let me tell you about a recent happening. Recently, Geertjan blogged about the discussions he had at Sun Tech Days, Johannesburg, 2008 with Netbeans users. One of these netbeans users told him that despite being an ardent Netbeans fan, his company had chosen IntelliJ, over Netbeans, for 3 reasons, of which he could recall only 2: The first being that IntelliJ has better XML support. That's quite true, as you have great code completion and the very needed schema aware hyperlinking of XML tags to their schema or DTD definitions, which is not yet there in Netbeans. You can hyperlink from a tag to its DTD or schema definition, as well as to any class declared in the XML tags. The second reason they chose IntelliJ was because of TestNG support, which according to Geertjan, is not that mature.

With that told, I guess its quite obvious that Netbeans too should provide that kind of XML support, as we should make sure our favorite IDE doesn't fall behind anywhere in providing the best aid to developers (being as frank as I can possibly be). We have a lot more in mind. But for a start, Varun Nischal and I will be working on adding hyperlinking support for XML (xsd-constrained as well as dtd-constrained). Implementation would take place in two phases/milestones. In it's first phase, we aim to implement hyperlinking within a DTD and DTD-constrained XML, and then this effort aims to achieve hyperlinking for XML tags, that conforms to the constraints defined by XML Schema.

If you have any ideas of your own to suggest, or want to comment on this project, please do so either here on my blog or Varun Nischal's post on his blog or at our Netbeans Dzone article: "Internship Project: Schema Aware XML Hyperlinking". You will also find details about our project, along with use cases of schema-aware XML hyperlinking that we're planning to implement in Netbeans in the Dzone article.

Geertjan Wielanga gave mileage to our project by speaking about it in the latest, Netbeans Podcast #43, right at the end of the show. You might be aware that the Netbeans podcast is always done by Roman Strobl and Gregg Sporar, but this one happens to be a special podcast done by 4 people, with the addition of Geertjan and Lloyd. I've scraped this from the audio at around 46:53,

Roumen: ..I believe this is it for this episode of the Netbeans Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Geertjan: One more thing!

Roumen: Yea..

Gregg Sporar: Wait, that's not it! Wait!

Geertjan: I am sorry I have one more thing that I wanted to quickly insert, and that is that, umm.. in India, there was recently a Code for Freedom Contest, and today I was told that, Angad Singh and Varun Nischal, are doing internship as a result of that Code for Freedom Contest, at the engineering center in Bangalore. They're implementing hyperlinking support for XML documents in Netbeans, so that the tags and the attributes in the XML documents that are governed by DTD's and Schema will have hyperlinks, when you hold down the control key and you move the mouse over, so that you can jump from those attributes and tags to definition in the schema or DTD. So I had to quickly insert that, because, I think this is really cool.

[unrecognizable voice]: Yea, that sounds cool.

This kind of recognition gives great impetus to put in our best efforts for the project.

It is going to be a long pleasant journey, and this is just the beginning. Watch out for updates.

Technorati Tags: netbeans,xml,hyperlinking,dtd,schema