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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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Decision Management and software development I – Agile

February 13, 2009

Last week I posted Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product and I decided that this week’s posts would be a series of follow-ups on how decision management can and should impact software development. Today on how it should impact/be a part of Agile, tomorrow on Model-Drive Engineering and Thursday on DSLs (Domain [...]

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Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product

January 30, 2009

The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals had a post on a 21st Century Software Development Process that reminded me of one of my favorite topics – the need for programmers, especially Agile programmers, to get on…

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IBM and ILOG for a smarter planet

January 27, 2009

One of IBM’s big initiatives is their focus on a smarter planet. One of the ways IBM could really use ILOG is to make the construction of smarter systems (or smart (enough) systems) easier and faster. To illustrate what I mean I took some quotes from Sam Palmisano’s Smarter Planet speech
our world is becoming instrumented

Absolutely [...]

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IBM and ILOG – Thoughts on Jerry Cuomo’s WebSphere Top 10

January 24, 2009

Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog  WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!.

Business Mash-ups
Business Rules
Middleware-as-a-Service
Rainmaker
Extreme Scale
WAS.NEXT
Restful – Agile
DataPower-lution
POWERful Middleware
Industry-savvy Middleware

He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. Serveral of these – business mash=ups, business rules, Middleware-as-a-Service and Agile [...]

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Hardcoding + procedural code = bad news

January 13, 2009

In a blog post about Hardcoding Considered Harmful – or is it? Jeff Palermo said
Oren Eini boldly makes the assertion that a system is simpler to maintain when configuration is hard-coded in one place within the system. Coupled with an automated testing and deployment process, changing configuration can be just as simple and predictable [...]

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Decision Services as agile, intelligent agents

December 19, 2008

Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…

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If IT can’t get you there, perhaps decision management can

December 18, 2008

Dick Lee had an interesting post titled We Know Where We’re Going, But IT Can’t Get Us There. He made a number of points of which three stood out: Business often fails to communicate effectively to IT Poor process definition…

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SOA is necessary for agility but not sufficient

December 8, 2008

Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility.
When a business change is considered

how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements
for services that change, how significant are the changes

It is this second point that interests me. When [...]

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Business Event Management and Decisions

December 4, 2008

There has been another flurry of posts around event processing and event management recently. IBM recently announced Business Event Management about which the architect guy had this feedback, Carole-Ann posted An attempt at demystifying CEP, BPM and BRMS and Eric Roch replied with EDA, CEP, BPM, BRMS and SOA. This is also a topic on [...]

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Using decision management to prepare for an unknown future

November 18, 2008

Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]

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Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams

October 29, 2008

Jan presented on Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams: Towards High Definition Communication. Decision tables are ways to represent sets of rules and there are many ways to represent sets of rules including trees and graphs. Some ways of representing rules are clearer than others and some are better for validation of the rules. You [...]

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The role of decision management in creating (and maintaining) a common vision

September 3, 2008

An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend [...]

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Business Rules, Domain-Specific Languages and Models

August 12, 2008

I saw this piece on DSL and MDE, necessary assets for Model-Driven approaches and it made me think about DSLs. First, here’s the definition of a DSL from the article
DSL is a programming language or executable specification language that offers, through appropriate notations and abstractions, expressive power focused on, and usually restricted to, a particular [...]

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