Peeling Back the Microsoft Oslo 'Onion'

There's been quite a bit of speculation about what Microsoft's Oslo initiative for bringing SOA service development to the masses will eventually look like -- and the time is drawing very, very near.

At the core of the Oslo onion: modeling language and repository

At the recent International SOA Symposium in Amsterdam, Brian Loesgen, principal consultant with Neudesic, unveiled some tantalizing details on some of the features coming out of Microsoft’s Oslo modeling platform and next wave of technologies.  Microsoft is expected to unveil a Community Technology Preview at the upcoming Professional Developers’ Conference at the end of the month.

“Oslo is like an onion,” he explained. “At the core is a modeling language and a repository, which are surrounded by layers of tools and other functionality.

The meaning of the Oslo code name has been pared down from the initial meaning, he said. Whereas originally Oslo was used to refer to the entire wave of new technologies, this has been refined as Microsoft moves through the development lifecycle. Oslo today refers to the modeling platform, and other pieces of the overall vision have migrated into the next version of the .NET framework, Visual Studio and the capabilities that Microsoft “Dublin” will add to the Windows Server application server.

Brian said some people inside and outside of Redmond are saying that Oslo will be “just as important as the release of .NET 1.0.”  No official release or ship date has been set.  The Oslo platform  is seen as “an attempt to solve hard problems associated with the design, creation, deployment and management of distributed applications,” he said.

A big focus of Oslo is that it’s intended to enable non-technical people to be able to do SOA modeling. Some of the design tooling in Oslo is somewhat close to the user-friendliness of Office applications, Brian said. “Microsoft is attempting to do what its best at – commoditize and simplify complex technology. For example, BizTalk brought integration down to a level where it is commoditized and easy to deploy.”

Some unique features of Oslo include the fact that when a user creates a model, it becomes the application. “You create the model, and the runtime runs the model. Unlike past modeling approaches, with Oslo, the model actually is the application” he said. In addition, Oslo includes a repository that stores human-readable SQL artifacts, versus binary objects, he said.