Ever wanted a simple GUI tool for investigating an XML document in Linux ? Plucky-XML is a little app for doing just that.
Stefan asked me today (16 apr 2003) at work if there was a Linux GUI tool for looking at the tree structure of XML documents. Not knowing of any, I had to say no. But this simple question awakened a deep and somewhat long–lived programmer's itch, so I had to implement something quickly ; you know, a proof of concept of sorts. Thank the good green earth for James Henstrige's Python bindings for GTK, and the lovely XML parsing tools in Python ! After just a bit of hacking I got a little script worked out.
Download this bad boy and try it out. I hope to enable a couple of more advanced features sometime, especially basic in–place editing capabilities. Guess it really depends on what Stefan asks tomorrow at work.
Requirements
This plucky little tree viewer requires the GTK+ 2 language bindings for Python. You will also need to install the Python XML tools.
Debian users can install these packages using the following apt command (you'll need to have the debian unstable repository, deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main, in your apt sources list) :
# apt-get -t unstable install python2.2-gtk2 python-xml
License
This program is distributed under the conditions of the GNU General Public License. In particular the program comes with no warranty. Please, no unfair copying or binary–only redistributions. One of the greatest strengths of PyGTK is as a rapid prototyping tool, so being able to read the code is important.
Contact
If you know of any other GUI tools for working with XML trees, please let me know : Leif Johnson <leif@ambient.2y.net>.