Developer news: oXML plug-in, Drop Script Backgrounder

Raining Data has released the oXML plug-in for the Omnis Studio and mvDesigner development products.

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an API that lets you build XML and HTML documents, navigate their structure, modify, or delete elements and content, according to MacTech magazine . The oXML plug-in implements the DOM Level 1 API to access XML documents as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium on their Web site.

oXML adds the ability to parse and extract information from an XML document and to generate new XML documents using a standard set of methods provided by the DOM API. Plus, the oXML component also lets you display an XML document in the Omnis tree list component. The component offers additional methods for quickly converting an XML document to and from an Omnis List variable. The oXML plug-in is available now for Omnis Studio version 3.1 and later.

Also, developer James Sentman has released Drop Script Backgrounder, which turns an AppleScript compiled as an application into a background only application. Dragging the application onto the program again turns it back into a normal app.

This is particularly useful if you are running many scripts as acgi programs, or just don’t want a script you keep open to take up space in your dock, Sentman said. Drop Script Backgrounder is for Mac OS X only. Made with the REALbasic development environment from Real Software, it’s freeware and can be downloaded today.