What software tools are available?
One of the great things about basing our work on XML is that there are tools available for practically every computer platform. At Recordare, we used Microsoft tools for our first generation of Dolet software. The original Dolet for Finale plug-in was written in a mix of Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual C++ 6.0, using Microsoft’s MSXML parser. The Microsoft parser is designed to be easy to use within Visual Basic and succeeds admirably. We had great success with it. We then rewrote the Dolet for Finale plug-in in Java and C++ so that our software could run on Mac OS X as well as Windows. Many other projects are using Java for multiple platforms, including Linux. We are using the Xerces parser from the Apache group, as are most of the other Java-based MusicXML projects that we know. It also works very well for us. We have also heard good reports about the Xerces C++ parser. Other projects use the built-in XML support provided by Flash, Flex, and Python. If all you want to do is write MusicXM
