Microsoft Oslo | M language | Microsoft Application Modeling | MODELS remixed.
Forget everything you think you know about modeling and take a trip to "Oslo," a new model-driven application development platform from Microsoft. By making the modeling process less complex, more automated and more inclusive, "Oslo" will change who can develop applications, what sorts of applications can be modeled and how quickly new applications can be developed.Software modeling lets developers write applications at a much higher level of abstraction and allows more people to participate in the process. But even though these and other benefits of modeling have been known for decades, only large enterprises have generally been able to take advantage of the technology -- and only on a limited scale. There are many reasons for this, including the complexity of the modeling programs and barriers to collaboration between the various organizations involved in the development chain.
But modeling is quickly becoming an essential tool for application and software development in all IT organizations. Composite applications present new challenges around scalability, performance and reliability, and may be widely distributed across servers, networks, platforms and organizational boundaries. While traditional modeling approaches have focused on drawings and code generation, the platform has increasingly become model-driven. "Oslo" embraces this approach and provides a core platform across domains and roles to build executable model-driven applications.
That's why Microsoft is committed to making model-driven development a reality for mainstream IT organizations. To accomplish this, we’re building a general-purpose modeling platform, including graphical and textual modeling tools that make it easy for information workers, developers, software architects, business analysts and IT professionals to collaborate throughout the application life cycle. "Oslo" will consist of three elements that together constitute a major leap in software development:
- Quadrant, a modeling tool for Visual Studio that configures domain-specific views of models, allowing users to define and interact with the models in a rich and visual manner.
- "M," a new declarative modeling language that will let developers express models as text and will help them integrate models across domains.
- A relational repository for storing and sharing models.