XSLT, XQuery, XPath tooling

I'm always on the lookout for nice tooling. Preferably small and free (as in beer, though I like the other free too). Not because I'm cheap (though I am), but because that's the sort of tools that I can use without having to go through the bureaucratic hell associated with getting the boss or customer to pay for software licenses.

Here are two of my favorite free tools for working with XSLT, XQuery and XPath.

Architag XRay XML Editor. Technically a general purpose XML editor, but it really shines when you're writing XSLTs. As you're writing your XSLT, you can set an input document, and it'll continually evaluate your XSLT against that document. That way, the second you make a change to the XSLT, you'll get to see the effect it has. Awesome!

Besides this, it continually informs you of invalidities in your XML in a very unobtrusive way (no popups or any of that nonsense), and will automatically perform Schema validations if you have the right schema open. (No need to explicitly associate documents with schemas.)

Sadly, it only supports XSLT 1.0. Still, that's the version I usually have to use at work, so XRay still comes in handy very often.

Kernow. Kernow's stated goal is "to make it faster and easier to repeatedly run transforms using Saxon." It does so admirably, but it also has very convenient sandboxes for performing XSLT 2.0 or XQuery transforms, and XML Schema or Schematron validations. Maybe not yet as convenient as XRay, but still quite nice. Definitely recommended!