Model-Driven Development After Oslo
French development tools maker
SoftFluent recently announced the release candidate (RC) of its CodeFluent Entities Modeler, a visual interface for the CodeFluent Entities model-driven software factory tool. You can read our coverage of the release
here.
CodeFluent Entities Modeler enables dev shops to build out application components using a model-driven approach. What's interesting is that Microsoft had big plans of its own in the model-driven development space, with the project formerly known as Oslo. You can read about Oslo's demise here and here.
I asked SoftFluent co-founder Daniel Cohen-Zardi about how Microsoft's decision to set aside Oslo might impact his company's work on CodeFluent Entities.
"We have been working on our pragmatic, non-UML, model-driven approach for more than five years. We know that this is not an easy topic, from a technical standpoint, but also politically," Cohen-Zardi responded. "For a complex organization such as Microsoft, it requires striking the appropriate balance between various product groups with diverging interests, some of them having a vested interest into sticking customers to Microsoft technology.
Cohen-Zardi said dev shops today have three options. Abandon model-driven development and accept the re-development will have to happen with each new technology wave; take on the cost and risk of building custom domain specific languages (DSL); or commit to a model drive solution like CodeFluent Entities.
"The Oslo failure, as well as the limited success of [Microsoft's] DSL tools approach, validates what we had anticipated based on our 50 years of cumulated field experience as former Microsoft employees," Cohen-Zardi said.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/20/2010