ProductsTop 10 Reasons…

Check out the top 10 reasons to choose Altova software for your next development project.

Altova prides itself on always keeping abreast of new technologies and bringing them to market within innovative products before the ink is even dry on the industry standards. Altova is the undisputed leader in XML-related products based on W3C standards, and most recently, Altova added support for UML 2.1, the latest OMG standard, with UModel, the starting point for successful software development.

Examples of Altova XML leadership include: the first XML editor with full Unicode support in 1999; the first IDE for XML in 2000; the first graphical XML Schema editor in 2001; the first browser-based XML content editor and the first graphical WSDL editor and SOAP debugger in 2002; the first XPath 2.0 evaluator in 2003; and the first XML mapping tool with code-generation capabilities for multiple programming languages in 2004. Altova continued this trend with version 2005, which provided the first support of XSLT 2.0 throughout the entire product line, and provided the industry’s first XSLT 2.0 debugger and the first XQuery debugger for the Eclipse platform. The latest version updated standards conformance in keeping with all the latest specifications, including support for the RDF and OWL Semantic Web technologies in the new SemanticWorks product.

Supporting the latest UML 2.1 standard, Altova UModel is an affordable modeling application with a rich visual interface and superior usability features to help level the UML learning curve. UModel also includes code generation, reverse engineering of existing Java, C#, and Visual Basic .NET source and binary files, round trip engineering, modeling XML Schema in UML, and interoperability with other UML tools through industry-standard XMI import and export to empower users with the most productive benefits of software modeling.

Altova XMLSpy has won numerous awards since its introduction in 1999, including multiple Jolt productivity awards from Software Development Magazine, repeated Reader’s Choice awards from Visual Studio Magazine, XML Journal, and Java Developer’s Journal, and coveted Editor’s/Analyst’s Choice awards from PC Magazine, eWeek, and XML Journal. Altova MapForce – a revolutionary new tool for XML mapping and enterprise application integration (EAI) – immediately won the Jolt productivity award from Software Development Magazine in 2004 only 5 months after it was first released! MapForce now supports visual Web services implementation with code generation in Java and C# – allowing you to build Web services without having to write code manually.

With over 3 million users, Altova has the largest user-base of any XML product on the market. This provides two immediate benefits for you: first, you can feel confident that Altova is the choice of virtually all Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies for good reasons, and second, this ensures that you will see continued support, rapid innovation, and exciting new features in our products.

All Altova XML products are based on established standards released by the W3C - XML, DTD, XML Schema, XSLT 1.0/2.0, XPath 1.0/2.0, WSDL, SOAP, XQuery, XHTML, RDF, OWL - and together support all the necessary steps, such as editing, mapping, visual design, debugging, and code-generation to allow you to successfully build beneficial applications.

UModel supports the latest UML 2.1 revision of the UML 2 standard released by the OMG for visual design and analysis of software applications. In addition, UModel adds the capability to generate Java, C#, or Visual Basic .NET code from graphical software models, reverse–engineering of existing Java, C#, and Visual Basic .NET source code and binary files into UML models, and round trip engineering to keep models synchronized after code is edited directly.

SemanticWorks, the newest product in the Altova family, employs the same visual design paradigm that has made Altova products leaders in the XML industry. A graphical RDF and OWL editor, SemanticWorks removes the need to manually write RDF/XML or N-Triples code to implement Semantic Web applications, giving you a practical, accessible entry into working with these up-and-coming technologies.

Altova is privately owned and has no parent company with a hidden agenda to push its own platform, OS, database, or latest buzzwords. Instead, Altova provides software that lets you access all major databases and generate code for major platforms in today’s enterprise environment.

From the highly intuitive, visually pleasing, and completely customizable user interface to the project-management features that automate your work, Altova has always endeavored to provide true productivity gains to our customers. One example of this mission is the unique single-design stylesheet approach featured by Altova StyleVision. With one graphical design of a master stylesheet – called the StyleVision Power Stylesheet – you can immediately create multiple, standards-conformant stylesheets for rendering your XML into HTML, PDF, or Word/RTF, and you can also use the same visual design for Authentic electronic forms that shield your business users from the underlying complexity of XML and relational databases.

When it comes to using a technology such as XML in any application development scenario, it cannot be treated as an island – it needs to be integrated with other technologies in order to be used productively. That’s why Altova has been providing code-generation in its developer tools since 2002 and now supports the automatic generation of Java, C++, and C# code from both its cutting-edge XML Schema editor in Altova XMLSpy as well as from its award-winning Web services and data integration tool, Altova MapForce.

The schema editor in XMLSpy allows you to generate infrastructure code that enables your application to process XML data based on that schema in an efficient and developer-friendly manner.

MapForce enables you to generate program code whenever it provides added flexibility over XSLT, whenever using XSLT imposes a performance limit, or whenever you need to integrate XML with database, flat file, or EDI data in your mapping scenario.

MapForce provides code-generation support for the three major programming languages used in today’s enterprise environment - Java, C++, and C# - and comes with customizable code templates that allow you to adapt the generated code to your organization’s coding style and preferences. MapForce also provides visual mapping and code generation in Java and C# to implement Web services based on WSDL files and XML/database/flat file/EDI data sources.

Furthermore, our UML software modeling product, UModel, offers code generation in the Java, C#, and Visual Basic .NET programming languages to accelerate the implementation phase of software design with UML 2.1. UModel code generation also employs customizable code templates to support the coding standards of your enterprise.

In addition to being available as a stand-alone development environment for pure XML-centric work, Altova XMLSpy supports full integration with both Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET and the Eclipse application development platform, leaving the choice of multi-purpose IDE to the developer. When you run XMLSpy inside Visual Studio .NET or Eclipse, XMLSpy uses the native project management of the hosting IDE, which gives you complete and seamless integration into the workflow of these environments. At the same time, you get all the different XML-related views that XMLSpy is famous for – and they are right there inside your favorite IDE.

Altova is so confident in the quality and user-friendliness of our software that we let you try before you buy. All Altova software products are available for evaluation before you make your purchasing decision. You can simply download the software from our Web site, request a FREE 30-day evaluation-key from within the software, and use the product with all features enabled for a 30-day period.

Altova offers software in multi-tiered versions for different budgets and project requirements, and attractive volume-discounts make wide-spread adoption and standardization in the corporate environment easy.

In addition, Altova gives customers FREE upgrades to all major software versions and maintenance releases during their support period when they purchase an affordable one-year or two-year Support and Maintenance Package. You get priority technical support and all your upgrades for one low fee.

Altova delivers the richest feature-set of any product family in the XML development tools space. Please take a look at our feature matrix to see the full scope of Altova’s innovative software – then compare that with companies that offer imitation products and would want you to believe that they offer a better value – and you will quickly see why over 3 million users chose Altova.