Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here's my round up of some of the heftier Rules Engines around from The Register:

Rules engines are now a common business tool, helping automate what are often complex decision-making processes. Now with web front-ends and business language IDEs, there's a lot to look at when choosing your software.

While some tools help transfer business logic change responsibilities from developers to business users, others mean learning a whole new way of programming, using declarative languages to separate business logic from data – without changing the essential object-oriented nature of your applications.

Read the rest here.
2000 words on iLog, on JBoss and Fair Isaac.

Here's the first chunk of some work I've been doing for The Register, looking at rules engines and declarative programming.

Businesses run on rules. They define business processes, and describe just what happens if something goes right - or if it goes wrong. Do all the gold-rated customers get a 10% discount, and what happens if one calls customer support? Business rules are part of the decision support systems that underpin every business process.

You can write the rules into your application business logic, but they quickly become spaghetti code, as you try to wrap each and every rule into a self-referential chain of "if then else", "case endcase" and "do while" statements (depending on your language of choice). Business rules change more often than the applications behind them. Debugging every case can add days and complexity to application tests, and meanwhile the business process owner is waiting for you to make the last set of rule changes...

Read more here.