o:XML 5th Anniversary

1 May 2007

This year's Worker's Day 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 ahead is perhaps more important than looking back. 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 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.

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.