XML Studio — Advanced XML & XSLT Toolkit for VS Code
XML Studio is a comprehensive, all-in-one developer toolkit for working with XML and XSLT directly inside Visual Studio Code. Powered by the Saxon-HE engine, it provides real-time transformations, step-by-step debugging, interactive tree visualizers, XPath evaluation, schema validation, and data converters.
⚡ Key Features
🐞 Step-by-Step XSLT Debugger: Trace template matches, variable bindings, and node output in real time.
⚡ XSLT Transformer: High-performance transformation using Saxon-HE 10.
🌳 Interactive XML Tree Viewer: Collapsible hierarchical tree navigation with expand/collapse nodes.
🔍 XPath Evaluator: Test and evaluate XPath 2.0 / 3.1 expressions interactively against any XML document.
⚖️ XML Diff Viewer: Side-by-side visual comparison highlighting structural and textual changes.
🛡️ XML & XSD Validator: Instant well-formedness checks and strict XML Schema (XSD) validation.
🔄 Converters: Two-way XML ↔ JSON and XML ↔ CSV conversion.
🧹 Formatter & Minifier: Clean XML beautifier and whitespace-stripping minifier.
📚 Snippets Library: Ready-to-use patterns for common XML and XSLT tasks.
☕ Prerequisites
XML Studio runs the robust Saxon-HE 10 processor under the hood to ensure standard-compliant XSLT 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 execution.
Java Runtime (JRE/JDK 11 or higher) is required on your computer.
Most developers already have Java installed (via standard PATH or JAVA_HOME).
If you don't have Java, you can download a free, high-performance OpenJDK from Adoptium Temurin.
Custom Java Path (Optional): In corporate or multi-Java setups, you can explicitly configure your Java path in VS Code Settings under:
xmlStudio.javaPath (e.g. C:\Program Files\Eclipse Adoptium\jdk-21\bin\java.exe or /usr/bin/java).
🚀 Getting Started
Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+P on macOS).
Type XML Studio: Open Toolkit and press Enter.
The XML Studio dashboard will open in an editor tab.
☕ Support & Feedback
If you find XML Studio helpful in your daily development, consider starring the project or giving it a 5-star rating on the VS Code Marketplace!
