I’m excited to reveal some details of today’s Release 2 of Altova MissionKit 2016 desktop developer tools and software products!
v2016r2 introduces over 20 new features and updates to the Altova product line – but that’s a lot to cover in one blog post. Let’s take a look at the top five that are sure to blow your socks off.
An incredible variety of mobile phones and tablets exist in the world today and new models are announced continuously. All these mobile devices have different specifications and capabilities, which can be a problem for developers creating mobile apps. Tablets have large screen sizes, but don’t necessarily include cellular data, default color sets vary by phone manufacturer, and built-in mobile features may behave differently in each mobile operating system. Fortunately, the MobileTogether Designer provides an integrated development environment that lets users quickly design and build cross-platform mobile app features ideally suited to each end-user’s device.
MapForce 2016 introduces a revolutionary data mapping debugger that lets developers working on data integration projects examine data mapping output step by step to diagnose and perfect projects of any complexity. The MapForce data mapping debugger gives users deep insight into the exact inner workings of data integration and ETL projects in a way that was never before possible.
The debugger works with all MapForce data mappings for any combination of XML, XBRL, JSON, databases, flat files, EDI, Excel, or Web services data, including chained mappings, mappings with multiple input or output components, and mappings that include user-defined functions.
The MapForce data mapping debugger supports breakpoints and conditional breakpoints, and includes multiple manual stepping options to manually debug a data mapping or continue execution after a breakpoint is reached, allowing users to see as much detail as they need.
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As more specialized data is adapted for delivery on demand to mobile devices with smaller screens, documents with complex structures can be a challenge. Fortunately, MapForce, Altova’s graphical data mapping, conversion, and integration tool, has special features to accelerate data integration projects of all sizes.
For example, richly-formatted documents may include XML mixed content, a complex datatype that permits an XML element to contain text, attributes, and other child elements. Common instances of XML mixed content include blocks of text with tags for bold or italic fonts, or tags that select terms for indexing or other special treatment. Documents with XML mixed content can be difficult to include in a data integration project, since they appear to be free-form and unpredictable, with child elements that occur in any order or even multiple times within the parent.
The most recent few releases of XMLSpy included some pretty powerful speed increases for validations jobs, achieved by strengthening synergy between Altova products. Now, developers using XMLSpy can take advantage of RaptorXML Servers installed on their network for the processing of large or complex XML, XBRL, and project-based validation jobs – directly inside the XML editor.
The XML validator in XMLSpy is powered by the Altova RaptorXML validation engine, which already provides the closest possible standards conformance coupled with fast validation speeds. However, the validation rates achieved are still limited to single-core execution on the CPU available in the developer’s machine. RaptorXML Server, on the other hand, benefits from the substantial increase in processing power afforded by multi-CPU, multi-core servers for increased throughput and more efficient memory utilization.
What does this mean for you? Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of connecting XMLSpy to RaptorXML Server.
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We’ve published an e-book in multiple formats for your favorite tablet or other e-reader.
DiffDog Field Trials is a collection of information from the Altova blog, Tech Notes from the Library section of the Altova Web site, and DiffDog product feature pages. The e-book describes a wide range of real-world applications for DiffDog, Altova’s XML-aware diff/merge tool for files, folders, directories, and databases.
You can download DiffDog Field Trials from the Altova Web site in various formats:
· EPUB (1.57 mb)
· Kindle (3.08 mb)
· PDF (11.1 mb)
· iBooks (16.5 mb)
Or, look for DiffDog Field Trials soon in your favorite online electronic bookstore.
Editing EPUB files with DiffDog
As you can see from the list above, EPUB, the XML-based free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), is potentially the most efficient sharable file format. An EPUB document is based on a ZIP compressed archive containing style information, text formatted as html, and the images that appear in the e-book.
Altova XMLSpy provides powerful support for accessing, editing, validating and previewing EPUB 2.x documents. We used XMLSpy to assemble the EPUB version of our book, where we were able to interactively preview the result as we worked:
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Altova DiffDog was originally launched in 2005 as a diff/merge tool with XML-aware functionality to help users identify differences between XML files. It even identifies files that are XML-equivalent but appear different in a text comparison because of spacing, line-ending, or attribute order variations. 
DiffDog has continually improved over time with many new features including:
DiffDog 2011 Release 3 adds a new simplified directory sync feature to its robust folder diff/merge functionality. The Synchronize Directories dialog now includes a button at the top to select a complete directory sync in a single step. 
The Fully Synchronize feature produces an exact copy of the source directory, even if the target has newer versions of some files, and deletes files from the target that don’t exist on the source, making this choice a quick tool to backup complex directories containing many files and sub-folders. DiffDog provides a summary of all actions to be taken before any files are copied or deleted: 
If you want to prevent a file being overwritten or deleted from the target directory, you can click Cancel, and then use the Manual Override feature to ignore or reverse the copy direction for any file pair. 
Pretty good trick for an app that’s older than 42 in dog years*, isn’t it? Find out for yourself how DiffDog can faithfully synchronize your directories – download a fully-functional, free 30-day trial! * Popular myth suggests that one calendar year for a software developer is equivalent to 7 years in the life of a dog. For a more complete discussion of canine lifespan, see the Wikipedia article titled Aging in Dogs.