Microsoft details Oslo's modeling language, tools

IBM releases Jazz-based requirements definition tool set
Rational Requirements Composer brings requirements definition to the beginning of the life...

Web services debate: SOAP up or REST easy?
With Web 3.0 approaching, developers are weighing the costs and benefits of SOAP (and its ...

Industry Watch: Opening the door ... carefully
Security is not just for keeping the bad guys out, but for also letting the good guys in. ...

SOA Watch: New economic realities
In the current economic downturn, agile programming and SOA are attractive options that bu...

Integration Watch: A new twist on threads
The key to raising the efficiency of multiprocessors is to shrink the overall workload by ...

Integration Watch: The Return of NetRexx?
Java scripting languages are seeing a surge in popularity, with NetRexx looking particular...

Guest View: HATs off to content management
Document help writers face two choices: using HATs or CMSes. While CMSes are newer, they a...

From the Editors: Keep watching the clouds
Just because Amazon's EC2 is the first cloud platform to hit the market doesn't mean it is...

Zeichick's Take: PC Magazine and the changing media world
PC Magazine, one of the most venerable and respected computer magazines in the United Stat...

From the Editors: Election should shake up JCP
Rod Johnson has the right ideas for opening up the Java Community Process, and he may be a...

Advanced Corda CenterView™ Data Visualization for the BusinessObjects™ Intelligence Platform Corda Technologies presents a white paper on pervasive BI. The BusinessObjects business in...

From Mobile to SOA: A Guide for Optimized Application Deployment Customer need has driven the emergence of multiple computing tiers. Today’s application d...

e-Kit: Web Application Security Is your network secure? What about your web applications. If IT security is your top p...

Practical tips for saving money on code maintenance
If software design is expensive, well, code maintenance is even more so. When you look...

By David Worthington

October 10, 2008 — Nearly a year after announcing it, Microsoft has begun to lift the covers on its “Oslo” initiative. Today, the company disclosed details about the modeling language and modeling tools that anchor Oslo.

Oslo is a multiyear, multiproduct effort to develop new technology for customers to build, deploy, design and manage composite applications. At its core, Oslo consists of Microsoft “M,” an XML-based modeling language, and “Quadrant,” a visual modeling tool for Visual Studio.

M is a general-purpose language that is designed to help developers integrate models across domains. Parsing and lexing constructs enable M to translate Domain-specific languages (DSL) such as BPMN, BPEL and UML to lower-level formats that runtimes understand, explained Robert Wahbe, a Microsoft corporate vice president.

Visual Studio 2010 will provide IntelliSense code competition for creating models textually, he said.

“I don't see any reason that someone couldn't tie together EMF [metafile] and M in a way that could be used as a basis for model-based tools in the Eclipse framework. As Microsoft gets more and more serious about ALM and non-.NET applications that run on Windows, why shouldn't they reach out to the Eclipse community?” senior Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond wrote in an e-mail.

Models may also be shared using Quadrant, a visual designer for Visual Studio that configures domain-specific views of models. Microsoft will provide views for databases, Web services and workflows, but will rely upon its partners to tackle vertical DSLs, Wahbe said.

While Microsoft expects that most models will be expressed in text, Quadrant is geared toward more complicated models that require developers to work visually, he said. “It is hard to share models with just one,” Wahbe explained. “Other tools conflate modeling and pictures.”

Microsoft will standardize M to ensure that it has widespread industry adoption, he said, without saying what that process would be or which standards body would oversee it. Microsoft joined the Object Modeling Group last month.

By default, models that are written in DSLs are serialized from the Oslo repository into XAML, which Microsoft will use as its markup language and the executable model for the .NET framework, Wahbe said. “.NET executes XAML as a first-class citizen, and there is internal consistency for developers to leverage.”

According to Wahbe, the Oslo repository, which is based upon SQL Server, will function like a database that developers can use Microsoft Access or report writers to access. However, Quadrant is the “flagship” tool for creating rich views, he noted.

Indeed, Microsoft intends to make the experience as seamless as possible throughout its own stack. An update to Windows Server, code-named “Dublin,” permits the XAML-based format to be executed on Windows Server.

It broadly captures data in a high-level declarative way, Wahbe explained. Consequently, downstream tools such as Microsoft System Center will utilize metadata from models for configuring applications.

“M models the what as opposed to the how; the system specifies the how,” said Wahbe. For example, it would be up to a systems administrator to set parameters for a service level agreement through policy. Metadata can also be used in other non-executable domains, such as describing a house, he noted.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 will leverage M to provide multiple views across rules and map physical architecture to assets.

As first reported by SD Times, the programming model for Microsoft’s “Midori” operating system will have a dependence on metadata, with the aim being to allow the system to manage applications more reliably.

In essence, declarative programming replaces imperative programming at the OS level, said Hammond in a previous interview. Wahbe declined to comment on Oslo’s potential link to Midori.

“Once you are capturing metadata instead of processor (or OS) specific code, you start to decouple the deployment of an app for the specification of its services. I've been seeing some interesting thinking lately that posits that the OS as we know is splitting into two parts, a hypervisor and virtual applications (further than just virtual OSes). If this continues to happen, then one approach to dealing with the complexity is using metadata to drive configuration and provision of virtualized apps," Hammond wrote in an e-mail.

Microsoft will release M and Quadrant in a Community Technology Preview at the Professional Developers Conference.

Related Search Term(s): modeling, Visual Studio, XML, Microsoft

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32957

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

SEND FEEDBACK