gxmlviewer

August 13, 2001 - gxmlviewer 1.2.0-1 is released. See release notes below.
July 1, 2001 - gxmlviewer 1.0-2 is released. See release notes below.

gxmlviewer is an xmlviewer for linux with a netscape plugin, and now a bonobo control as well. (Thanks for Rodney Dawes for this contribution). See screenshots to see what it looks like.
gxmlviewer was written under RedHat 7.1, running Ximian Gnome, and has only been tested with RedHat 7.1 and netscape 4.76. I can't guarantee that it will work in any other environment. gxmlviewer required gtk and gnome libraries to be installed. In order to compile the bonobo component, you will also need the bonobo installed as well. I had to install Ximian Gnome to achieve this. I have heard from at least one person running Redhat 6.2, who has had a problem installing from rpm. rpm in 6.2 complains about the rpm version in the .rpm file.

I will provide updates as I fix bugs etc., but I will not be dedicating time to providing enhancements. If someone would like to take over the project and provide enhancements, then feel free to do so.

Downloads

Binary any source can be downloaded from the files section on the project page.

Installation Instructions

To build the source and binary rpms from source (as root), type

rpm -ta gxmlviewer-1.2.0-1.tar.gz

To build the binary rpm from the source rpm (as root), type

rpm --rebuild gxmlviewer-1.2.0-1.src.rpm

To install using rpm, simply type

rpm -Uhv gxmlviewer-1.2.0-1.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv xmlview-control-1.2.0-1.i386.rpm

To install manually, download the source and run the following commands from the base directory from which the tar.gz archive was unpacked.

./configure
make
make install

To uninstall manually.

make uninstall

When the install gxmlviewer from an rpm, the following files will be placed on your system...

/usr/bin/gxmlviewer stand alone xml viewer

/usr/lib/netscape/plugins/npgxmlviewer.so netscape plugin to swallow the standalone xml viewer.

Note: when you install using make install, things will be installed in /usr/local/....

When the netscape plugin installs it will associate itself with the text/xml mime type. Unfortunately, it does not register the file extensions for which it should be used. You can do this your self by going to Edit | Preferences, click Navigator, Click Preferences. Find text/xml in the list of mime types and click edit. In the field for extensions, place the extensions for which you want to use the gxmlviewer plugin. (I've set mine to xml). When you enter extensions, enter only the extension (xml) and not (.xml).

After you install the rpm package and restart netscape, go to Help | About and see if the gxmlviewer plugin show up as a plugin and that the mime type text/xml is enabled.

If you have problems with gxmlviewer then feel free to email me, Sean Stuckless, at sstuckless@home.com. I may not be able to respond in a timely fashion, but I will try to respond.

Bonobo Control

Rodney Dawes, who is working on the Encompass project, wrote the bonobo control. The gxmlviewer binary is still a stand alone xmlviewer, and it should install and run fine on any redhat 7.1 system (that's all that I have tried). If you install the xmlview-control and you get a message like...

bonobo >= 0.36 is needed by xmlview-control-1.2.0-1
libbonobo.so.2   is needed by xmlview-control-1.2.0-1
libbonobox.so.2   is needed by xmlview-control-1.2.0-1
liboaf.so.0   is needed by xmlview-control-1.2.0-1

Then I would suggest upgrading to gnome 1.4 which includes support for bonobo. (Ximian Gnome 1.4 is what I run)

When you install the bonobo control via rpm, it will install in /usr/..., if you use make install it will install in /usr/local/... . The important thing here is to realize that by default oaf files are only loaded if they are places in the /usr/share/oaf directory. You can modify the /etc/oaf/oaf-config.xml to have it search the /usr/local/share/oaf/ directory.

When you install the bonobo component, you should be able to test the component using ximian-file-viewer. When you load .xml file into ximian-file-viewer, it will display as editable text. In the select box at the bottom of the screen, you should be able to select "View with XML View" and that will load the xml file using the gxmlviewer bonobo control.

I'll admit, it took me awhile to get the bonobo control working, but that was primarily related to my lack of knowledge about the technology. Once I did get it working, I began to see how good it was.

Future releases

I would like to know how to "colorize" the xml tags and attributes. If anyone knows how to do this using a gtk control, then could you please email me.
It would be nice if the viewer would validate against the dtd. I don't know how to do this using libxml and the SAX api.
It would be nice if the viewer could optionally display the actual dtd.

Release Notes

August 13, 2001	gxmlviewer-1.2.0-1 - no functional updates to the xmlviewer. - bonobo control added. - project now in cvs, hosted at source forge. - rpm now installs in /usr/bin/ - netscape component will look in the path for gxmlviewer (it does not need to be in /usr/local/bin) - Build process has been improved, utilizing automake more effectively. (things link make install, make dist, etc., now work thanks to Rodney)
July 1, 2001	gxmlviewer-1.0-2 Minor updates to the build process. - Thanks to Rodney Dawes for providing a patch for configure and Makefile.am so that libxml could be dynamically included. - A gxmlviewer.spec is now included with the tar.gz bundle so that rpm can be build using 'rpm -ta gxmlviewer-*.tar.gz'. xmlparser.c now processes the dtd line. It does not validate, but it will display the DOCTYPE and attributes.
June 23, 2001	gxmlviewer-1.0-1 Initial release. Usable as a stand alone xml viewer and as a netscape plugin.

/usr/bin/gxmlviewer	stand alone xml viewer
/usr/lib/netscape/plugins/npgxmlviewer.so	netscape plugin to swallow the standalone xml viewer.