South Wind said the xmlFX Developer Toolkit for ActiveX, priced at $289, is designed to expedite the development of business-to-business XML applications. The toolkit is targeted at commercial and industrial Visual Basic and Delphi development teams building distributed applications that use XML to exchange transactional data. South Wind said the ActiveX control is fast, lightweight, reliable and commercially oriented.

The xmlFX DTK for ActiveX component modules include:

• xmlFX ActiveX control (for XML document processing)
• Extensive documentation
• Sample code
• South Wind's Simple XML Query Language, or SXQL.

According to South Wind, the xmlFX DTK's secret weapon is SXQL, included with both the ActiveX and C++ versions. South Wind said SXQL gives developers an easy way to access and manipulate transactional XML documents. By transactional XML, the company means: No mixed content, elements contain strings in which leading and trailing white space is insignificant to the application; no DTD needed to process, in particular, no attributes that cannot be treated as simple PCDATA type attributes; ASCII or ISO-8859-1 character encoding; document structure issues mutually agreed upon in advance by exchanging parties.

Dale Hunscher, president and chief executive officer of South Wind said people are eager to use XML, but the available tools are not suited to the needs of most application developers.

"Paradoxically, most of the tools are targeted at complex document-oriented applications and are way too complicated for the transactional applications being built by the average XML coder," he said.

He added that South Wind's ActiveX control is the only XML tool specifically targeted at Active Server Pages, Visual Basic and Delphi developers building transactional applications.