ORM Software

ORM is supported by a variety of modeling tools. At the time of writing, the Neumont ORM Architect (NORMA) tool provides the most complete support for the ORM 2 notation discussed in this book. NORMA is an open source plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and may be downloaded, along with supporting documentation, either from www.ormfoundation.org or from http://sourceforge.net/projects/orm.

The previous version of ORM (ORM 1) is supported as the ORM Source Model Solution in a high end version of Microsoft Visio (Halpin et al. 2003). A discontinued ORM tool known as VisioModeler is freely available as a download from Microsoft’s MSDN Web site. Although VisioModeler does not run under Windows Vista, and the product is somewhat outdated in its database driver support, it does allow you to create ORM models under earlier versions of Windows and map them to a range of database management systems. To download the VisioModeler tool, point your browser at http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads, and then search for “VisioModeler 3.1 (Unsupported Product Edition)”.

Other tools supporting different flavors of fact orientation include Doctool, Case-Talk, and Infagon. Other fact-oriented tools under development at the time of writing include ActiveFacts and CogNIAM. Links to these tools may be found in the Useful Web Sites section at the back of this book.