Posts tagged as:

declarative

Some thoughts on perfect application development

March 10, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
John Reynolds had an interesting post a little while back where he shared some thoughts on Perfect development tools. His emphasis was on support for things like iterative and test-driven development but it seems to me that there is also a need to move application development beyond code.
While developers do need development environments [...]

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More on replacing COBOL with something useful

February 10, 2010

Lisa posted an interesting comment on an old post of mine (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)) in which she make some interesting comments:
I understand your last point that using a declarative “model” such business rules would be preferable to replace legacy COBOL applications instead of using a procedural language.
Indeed. [...]

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Is your legacy modernization program just “forward to the 70s”?

February 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ

Phil Murphey, over at Forrester, had a post on  Apps Modernization – What are Your Top Priorities in 2010/11? that reminded me I wanted to write about modernization a little before the year got too far advanced. As Phil says the coming years are going to be really interesting:
Leading edge technologies will become [...]

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Business processes and decisions – an emerging consensus?

January 21, 2010

Bruce Silver wrote a couple of interesting posts on this topic – Integrating Process and Rules – Part 1 and Part 2. Reading Bruce’s posts, and thinking back on the various posts I have written about business process and business decision management (Risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning, Adding decisioning to your BPM initiative or [...]

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Decision management and the top 4 concerns of CIOs

September 29, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four:

Business productivity and cost reduction
IT and business alignment
Business agility and speed to market
Business process re-engineering

It seemed to me, reading this list, that all four of these were concerns that could be addressed [...]

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Getting to Enterprise Application 2.0

August 26, 2009

On Monday I posted about Enterprise Application 2.0 and promised to return with some thoughts on how to get from Enterprise Application 1.0 to Enterprise Application 2.0. Let’s see:

Expose core elements as services
Identify and manage processes – hook up legacy and new services into new, more effective workflows
Find and automate decisions using business rules
Manage simple [...]

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Some thoughts on Application Development 2.0

August 12, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
As the summer doldrums roll on I thought I would try and stir things up a little with a “2.0″ post – specifically some thoughts on a software stack for “Application Development 2.0″. Such a stack would:

Model processes, events and decisions as first class objects
Support declarative (rules-based) approaches to developing business logic
Use visual [...]

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Book Review – Principles of the Business Rule Approach

August 1, 2009

Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ron Ross
This book is one of the classics on business rules from one of the most long-standing authors in the area, Ron Ross. The book is a little more than three years old but, as it is not really focused on technology for managing business rules so much [...]

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A message for the application developer in the mirror

July 7, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Mike Gualtieri is always interesting over at the Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals. This week he has a post called Do Application Developers Need To Change Their Ways? In the post he asks developers to look at the person in the mirror (he’s been listening to Michael Jackson’s song [...]

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Business Rules are a failed abstraction – so what?

July 3, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Jeff Attwood had a great post over on Coding Horror – All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions in which he discussed a Joel Spolsky article in which that states
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

At some level, of course, this is true and Jeff goes on to say
But I’d also argue that virtually [...]

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First Look – IBM/ILOG BRMS 7.0

June 17, 2009

As previewed yesterday, ILOG (now an IBM company) is releasing the 7.0 products of their business rule management system (BRMS) family. These mark a big step forward for the ILOG product range. ILOG BRMS 7.0 has the standard BRMS components – an Eclipse-based development environment (Rule Studio), a web-based collaboration environment for non-technical users (Rule [...]

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First Look – Lyza

June 10, 2009

I got a chance to see Lyzasoft’s new product in action recently. Lyzasoft aims to provide a desktop product for business people to do analysis that can seamlessly scale up, unlike (say) spreadsheet based analysis. The product is based around a column store.
Workbooks are the core metaphor and these are used to assemble flows. Data [...]

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Using business rules to add decision transparency

May 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Jim Sinur had a short post on The Power of Visibility with BPM Enabled Processes that made me think about another kind of visibility – visibility of decisions. One of the most powerful benefits of adopting business rules to manage decisions is that the approach generates increased visibility into the decision making process [...]

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Open Source Enterprise Business Rules Arrive

May 19, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Today is the official release day for the new release of JBoss Enterprise BRMS – Drools 5.0 as was. Key features in this release are the repository/repository management tools and the new features that let business users and business analysts participate directly in editing the rules. Craig Muzilla, the VP Middleware Business Unit [...]

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A Response to a cowardly programmer

April 22, 2009

I got a comment recently from “Joe” who was too much of a coward to actually post his name, his email or to link to his own blog/site/twitter feed. You can read it on my post Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead. His comment was so indicative of the [...]

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Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead

April 9, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I saw this list of 10 skills developers will need in the next five years – developers not programmers you notice – and I was struck by several things.
First and foremost it still assumed that application developers would be programming – not assembling applications from components, not specifying the behavior of a system [...]

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First Look – WorkXpress 2

April 2, 2009

I got a chance to see a pre-release demonstration of WorkXpress 2.0, announced today, some weeks back. WorkXpress are focused on customized business application software for large and small businesses. About 7 years ago they started building out what we would now call a Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS offering and have had customers for about 5 [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much III

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Concluding my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to answer the specific comments I got. First, the reasonable ones:
Ken said:
It depends on the business requirement. If business rules need to be changed on the fly then a rules engine framework makes the most sense. If, as [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much I

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by his [...]

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Decision Management and software development III – DSLs

February 13, 2009

Martin Fowler always writes interesting things on his site and this one was no exception: Will DSLs allow business people to write software rules without involving programmers? In it he says:
…greatest potential benefit of DSLs comes when business people participate directly in the writing of the DSL code. The sweet spot, however is in making [...]

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