I am Hugh Field-Richards, long since retired from a career as a computer scientist; I am now a professional music engraver and publisher (Hop Vine Music). I also played the bassoon extensively in the Malvern area where I have lived for over 40 years. Unfortunately a recent horse riding accident has curtailed my playing somewhat, but has allowed time to concentrate on some technical work and publishing. I started Rexsel to help in the development of all my projects which use XSLT, including the Hop Vine Music site, and the Paloose web server.
As far as I am aware only those maintained by me:
- This site (obviously)
- Hop Vine Music which is my music publishing site.
- Paloose which is a Web engine for XML based sites that I developed over 15 years ago.
Although the current state of Rexsel language and compiler is reasonably mature, there are several areas which could benefit from further work.
- Add support for later versons of XSLT, currently only XSLT1.0 and XSLT1.1 are supported. There should be no problem adding further support other than my time.
- Analysing XPath expressions. This is a fairly advanced process and may never be implemented.
- Checking on scope definitions to ensure that there is a corresponding definition of the name in a match statement.
- Checking if parameters in a proc declaration exist when the call is made.
- Improving the editor for the MacOS application which is currently very crude. The text editor panel needs: undo/redo, syntax aware colouring, etc.
I have always used the oXygen XML editor and IDE for developing XML projects that envolve XSLT and RELAX-NG. I used it as part of my work before I retired and started Paloose. I had been involved with SGML and XML for many years and oXygen had always been the editor I turned to. Since I retired the good folks at oXygen have supported my various open source projects by supplying me with a suitable licence, for which many thanks. Whenever I have XML/XSL to develop their editor is the one I turn to. Having it syntax aware of PHP, CSS and other languages is a real bonus.
For those who are interested the Rexsel site was built on a system called Paloose, which is a subset of the Cocoon system, but written in PHP5 rather than Java.