Re: Is ORM still live ???

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_golden.net> wrote in message news:t9mdnWxaLcSL_COi4p2dnA_at_golden.net...
>
> "Scot Becker" <newsgroups_at_orthogonalsoftware.com> wrote in message
> news:Ze2dnTVQY_hM0iOiRVn-uw_at_comcast.com...
> > > 3)
> > > ORM is "sponsored by Microsoft" and a lot of people don't like MS
> >

> Terry Halpin invented ORM. I believe Visio acquired his company and then
> Microsoft acquired Visio thereby inheriting Dr. Halpin.

Terry didn't invent ORM, but he formalized many parts of it when he was in acedemia and wrote a book on FORML, a dialect of ORM, now (basically) in it's third edition. The ORM tools acquired by Visio were actually from InfoModelers, an Asymetrix spin off. Not quite MS but close (Paul Allen). Visio then folded in that functionality into the Visio drawing engine with version 5.0. Visio was then acquired by Microsoft who pretty much left everything as is and haven't done much with it since, unfortunately.

My point was that before Microsoft was ever in the picture, ORM was alive and well. Its research roots are more or less around the same time frame as ER, for that matter.

Frankly, I would love it if the tool was "sponsored" by Microsoft because then they would throw a decent marketing budget at it and develop more features for the tool. As it stands now, third party extensions are being written (plug: free Visio/ORM/ER add-on available at the URL below) to add on to it.

> One always runs the risk of interfering with thought when one adopts a
> graphical method. Of the graphical methods I have examined, ORM minimizes
> this risk.

I agree. Some folks prefer to omit the diagram part of ORM since it is all expressible in (formalized) natural language anyway. In the tool, you can enter a model without a single shape on the page.

I'm not one of those people because I tend to think more visually, but I use the English print-outs from the model when validating it with business users, who tend to be overwhelmed with most graphical languages (including ER).

Kind Regards,
Scot.

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Orthogonal Software
www.orthogonalsoftware.com

ORM Blog: www.objectrolemodeling.com Received on Fri Nov 21 2003 - 23:33:48 CET