If you have experience making mappings with middleware like Microsoft Biztalk or even SAP PI, you may have encountered XSLT at some point.

I know that a lot of companies use message mappings along with a graphical tool. However, there are also quite a lot that do not.

Every programming language comes with its initial set up phase where you choose your IDE among other stuff. What about XSLT ?

For some middleware like Microsoft Biztalk you have nice native integration with popular IDE like Visual Studio. You can develop and deploy your mapping directly from the IDE and that makes the development really easy.

For some others like SAP PI, there are no such integration and you are left on your own to find the best dev environment.

When working with SAP related stuff, Eclipse comes up a lot in the discussions. It’s an IDE that have been around for a long time and that have a long list of plug-ins. You can almost run anything in Eclipse ( even connect to an SAP system to develop ABAP objects ). This is for exemple how I have been developing for our S/4 migration project. It’s honestly a pretty powerful tool and I have nothing to say about this.

However, I just don’t like Eclipse.. It’s heavy and the initial setup can be really time consuming especially in a corporate environment where you have heavy security and limited rights.

I just don’t think it is worth it for simple, quick development.

That’s why I have decided to use VS Code for my XSLT development. It is free, powerful and lightweight. I know that it is also not perfect but it is enough for my quick devs.

Plus, I am also dabbling with Web Apps so it’s two birds one stone.

There is also an initial set up phase needed with VS Code ( finding the right XSLT engine, etc.. ) but I feel that it can still be done faster than Eclipse.

However now I have other problems: choosing the right XSLT engine, finding a way to mock the external libraries used in my client environment and so on.

A lot have been already done with Eclipse to facilitate the integration with SAP. That is not the case with VSCode and that’s where I will probably loose a lot of time. But I don’t know I feel like once it’s done it will make future set-up painless.

Or maybe I’m just looking for a challenge ?

What about you ? What’s your go to tool for XSLT development ?

You can check on how I setup XSLT development with VSCode on the page below:

/https://theconnectedclouds.blog/2023/12/17/running-xslt-templates-with-vs-code/