I have been following David Carver's posts on Planet Eclipse about the Eclipse XSLT Tools project and today I decided to give the latest milestone a try.

The project is part of the WTP incubator and they have just released 0.5M6. Even though this is just a milestone of an incubating project, the current set of features is already very impressive.

The XSLT editor provides auto-complete functionality (Ctrl+Space) for both XSLT and XPath, and it shows errors for invalid XPath expressions.

There is a new type of run configuration to quickly apply one (or more) XSLT stylesheets to an XML input file. This way you no longer have to create an Ant build file (with just one target and one task) to do this.

There is also an XSLT debugger included but I did not yet test it.

Of course there is still a lot of polishing to do before a 1.0 release but the stuff I have seen so far looks really great. If you're doing any XSLT development, you should give it a try.