I was speaking with a colleague of mine the other day about work we are doing with an ORM meta model, and how people are starting to use ORM meta models to investigate ways of melding 'relational schemas' with 'functions' (viz Dr Morgan's 2007 ORM conference work on Business Process Modeling and ORM).
My friend said "Oh, your making a graphical programming language?!"
In researching Dr Halpin's paper entitled "Join Constraints" (which can be found on Dr Halpin's web site (orm.net) concludes with an invitation to discuss, research [and possibly even debate] the further extensions to ORM.
On reflection I found myself thinking that my colleague was right to some extent [to my mind]....
i.e. the more you add higher level logic to a inherently graphical notation, the more it becomes like a graphic programming language.
I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions on this, and envisaging a what a 'software tool' would look like that did this.
1. Is it NORMA, coupled to Visual Studio?
2. Or is it something else entirely?
3. And do people want it?
4. What are the benefits over ORM diagrams for data modeling, business rule repositories for higher order logic [within those rules], and just 'code' for even more complex logic?
If this is something that interests you, or you think you have an insight worth sharing with the rest of the community, perhaps this is a good forum and thread to investigate that?