Oslo Makes the Top Ten

We’re just getting back into the swing of things after a couple of weeks break over the Christmas holidays, not to mention the disruption of unusually heavy snow followed by floods here in the Seattle area. Two articles caught my attention this week.

One, an article in eWeek by Darryl Taft, positions Oslo at number 9 in the Top Ten Development Products for 2008 (even ahead of the iPhone SDK). Also, in the text version of the story, Oslo makes it to number 2! Granted, in this latter story, Darryl makes more of the emerging relationship between Microsoft and the OMG (though I’d push back against the “indifferent if not hostile” comment).

It’s the text version of the story that links to my second article, a blog posting by Charles Young called Oslo and the OMG. This is an amazing article, a great summary of OMG technologies and some erudite interpretation of our Oslo strategy gained from the PDC bits and such information as we’ve made public. Charles pieced together some useful comparisons between the OMGs layered metamodel stack (M0, M1, M2, etc)and MSchema, as well as relationships between software factories and MDA, and highlights some shortcomings of the previous Microsoft Repository (he missed a few critical ones J ) versus the Oslo Repository approach.

As we firm up our Oslo ship plans, we’ll have a lot more light to shed publicly about Oslo and its relationship to UML and other OMG technologies, but for a summary of the key issues, Charles’ article is well worth reading.