Emacs with nxml-mode has become my XML editor of choice, thanks to real-time validation and context-sensitive editing features. The price of the elegance and utility is that nxml-mode requires a Relax NG compact syntax ("RNC") schema, and most of the documents that I work with are defined by XML Schema.
So, with the intention of using Emacs as an editor for WS-BPEL, I put together a RNC schema for the legacy version of WS- BPEL, a.k.a., BPEL4WS 1.1. You can download the schema from here. The schema comes without the 14.3 "enhancements" to assignment enabled, but there is a comment that explains how to make the one-line change needed.
This was my first outing with the RNC syntax, and after a quick skim over the tutorial, the terseness of the syntax is agreeable. For writing RNC, David Rosenborg's rnc-mode was helpful, and nxml-mode will "validate" RNC documents when it loads them. (To specify a schema for a document, use C-cC-s.)
I now have the following in my .emacs:
(setq auto-mode-alist
(cons '("\.\(xml\|xsl\|rng\|xhtml\|bpel\)\'" . nxml-mode)
auto-mode-alist))
and it works like a charm. As a bonus, some of the little differences between Relax NG and XML Schema allow the RNC version performs some validation that the XML Schema is not able to, e.g., knowing the various legal attribute combinations versus all possible attribute combinations on a <bpel:from>.
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