o:XML 5th anniversary

Yesterday, May 1, marked the 5th anniversary of the o:XML project. We  
can look back on five years of intense and exciting developments.  
o:XML now comprises a whole family of highly interesting, innovative  
and in some cases cutting edge technologies.

It's also been five years of o:XML proving itself as a language fit  
for large scale, production grade projects. A series of commercial  
projects have been undertaken with o:XML as the core language  
technology, where it has delivered   robust, high-performance, on- 
time and on-budget solutions. Through this work, and through the  
close relationship we have with many of our users, o:XML has matured  
in a way that would not otherwise have been possible.

Looking to the future is always more important than looking at the  
past. Work is currently underway to produce the next generation of  
o:XML tools and technologies. Important language changes will be  
incorporated in an all-new compiler/interpreter. These changes  
represent an important coming of age for o:XML, incorporating all of  
the lessons learned in the last five years.

The new toolset, called ObjectBox2 (keeping it simple!), is based  
around MLML [1] and brings with it a host of improvements. Amongst  
other things you can expect to see improved contextual error  
messages, compiler error detection (including type checking!), multi  
schema validation, further improved integration with other  
technologies and much enhanced execution performance. This short list  
belies the depth of the changes; the next generation tools will allow  
for quite different methods of development to be undertaken.

The new generation tools will position o:XML not only as a solid  
general purpose programming language, but also as a uniquely powerful  
domain specific language that can be applied to all XML problems,  
from almost any chosen application platform.

Another important change is that commercial o:XML services is soon to  
be offered by an industry consultancy group specialising in XML and  
compiler technologies.

I hope that you will find these developments as exciting as I do.  
Thank you all for your support over the years, and for the support  
that you keep lending the o:XML endeavour.

best regards,


/m


[1] http://www.o-xml.org/projects/mlml.html