Taking aim at business software developers, IBM has unveiled a set of tools designed to make it easier to engineer applications using emerging XML standards.

Three new XML development tools have been added to the firm's Emerging Technologies Toolkit for developers and early adopters, which is available from IBM alphaWorks.

IBM's latest software for developers includes the compound XML Document Editor to help create, edit and manage web applications, and XML documents that combine existing and emerging XML standards.

The tool ships with support for XHTML, XForms, XML-Events, SMIL, SVG, VoiceXML, XUL and MathML among others.

Big Blue also unveiled its XML Forms Generator designed to help developers automatically build XML forms conforming to standards such as WSDL and Java Server Page response templates.

In addition IBM showed off XML Enhancements for Java, newly unveiled language extensions to Java 1.4 designed to provide support for XML, XML Schema and XPath in Java.

According to Big Blue, the tools can help developers reduce the manual coding required to create complex on-demand web applications that use emerging XML standards and tie into Services Oriented Architecture.

IBM is also expanding support for XML developers with improved education and learning resources on its developerWorks online community.