Chris Berg wrote a nice piece on Pressure Points that seemed like it was worth highlighting. Chris outlines some great reasons for using business rules and he seems to Believe in business rules (as I do).

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 [...]

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

My friend Steve has been using the ILOG Rules for .NET product (which you can now download for an extended trial as I discussed here) and has written a nice little review of it - Lab test: ILOG Rules for .Net meshes well with Microsoft. There’s a lot to like in the .Net version of [...]

Just heard that ILOG is going to be acquired by IBM! I don’t have any more detail yet but hopefully the folks at ILOG and IBM will brief me sometime soon…..

ioSemantics is a company focused on automating and improving the QA process within decision management. Focused on increasing agility, ioSemantics is developing new technology to improve the link from development to production, especially in the kind of tight operate - assess - adapt - redeploy loop you see when business rules are being used [...]

I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it - I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the [...]

Just saw the announcement that Tibco is buying Insightful. Insightful has a range of data mining tools build on the open source R algorithms as well as some proprietary pieces. This means that Tibco now has a BPM environment, a rules/event processing one, Spotfire for visualization and data mining/predictive analytics development and deployment. In theory [...]

Shao Fang presented the D3 (Demand Driven Development) program and their work on integrating business rules into the Intalio BPMS. A few notes on the D3 program:

Not custom development
Community suggested projects
Customers put up money for features they really want and get credit for them
Some are decoupled and done offshore, some more tightly integrated and done [...]

When I read Ade McCormack’s book The IT Value Stack I was struck by many sections (as you can see from the review) and one thread in his narrative prompted this post. He recommends avoiding software development (because it is expensive and high risk). Ht talked about the importance of sweating the technology (making the [...]