JRules 6.7 builds on the industry-leading JRules 6 BRMS. There’s more control and flexibility for business users, and expanded support for IT platform infrastructure.

This recorded presentation covers what’s new in JRules 6.7:

• Features
• Benefits
• In-depth product demonstration

Find out why JRules 6.7 is the best solution for managing decision change, complexity, and compliance in your mission-critical business systems.

• View a recorded version of the presentation
• Slides from the presentation

More JRules information:

• JRules product pages
  
• Ready to test drive? Download the JRules Trial now

If you’re a policy manager in a Fortune 1000 company, chances are that your company continues to maintain real-time business applications written in COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language).

If the challenge of making your existing mainframe COBOL applications more agile without disrupting your mission-critical systems brings you out in a cold sweat, or you simply don’t have the budget or the time to redevelop all your existing COBOL applications, then you should definitely attend DIALOG 08 to hear more about ILOG Rules for COBOL.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that, other than the hoo-ha around the whole Y2K issue, I don’t actually know a great deal about COBOL. Fortunately, Wikipedia is my friend, and ILOG’s BRMS Product Marketing team have been kind enough to bring me up to speed about why this new add-on for ILOG JRules is so significant (about 80% of the world’s top businesses do rely on COBOL to keep running, after all). Following yesterday’s official product announcement, James Taylor was also quick to provide some interesting commentary in his blog about the new add-on.

In a nutshell, ILOG Rules for COBOL brings the advantages of ILOG’s leading business rule management system (BRMS) to existing COBOL applications. The key lies in gradually moving the rules from your COBOL applications to a central repository, where they can be externally managed, and yet still executed in COBOL code.

Like it or not, COBOL isn’t going away any time soon, but with ILOG Rules for COBOL, you finally have a way to access the business logic that’s locked within your large mainframe applications. With JRules BRMS and Rules for COBOL, you can manage change in legacy applications NOW. But don’t just take my word for it: stop by the BRMS booth in the Solutions Hall at DIALOG 08 and be among the first to see demos of the new COBOL add-on and talk directly to the people who developed it.

Of the many customer applications that will be showcased at DIALOG 08, the one developed by SAT, the tax collecting authority for the Mexican Federal Government, really caught my eye - and not just because of the opportunity for a cute title for today’s post. Statistics such as “a 93% reduction in paperwork,” “1,800 tax-paying scenarios,” and “2.5 million tax return questionnaires” really do grab your attention!

The application, which makes it easier for SAT to implement changes in taxation policy, was developed with the help of ILOG alliance partner EMC Documentum. It relies on ILOG’s business rule management system (BRMS) together with a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) implementation to automate the processing of tax questionnaires, determine taxpayer credit worthiness, and manage workload assignment policies.

SAT’s business rules are very complex and implementing these rules with regular code was proving increasingly difficult and painful. ILOG’s BRMS provided the necessary separation between the business rules and the application code, offering immediate benefits such as the ability for taxpayers to self-register online, and enabling tax officers to change rules by themselves without depending on IT.

The statistics are indeed impressive, but what’s really inspiring here is the long term contribution that this application will make to the Mexican government’s ongoing program of tax reforms. While JRules can’t (yet) make you live forever, it is helping to improve the distribution of wealth and the living standards of millions of Mexicans - and that’s definitely worth a closer look!

Roberto Pazaràn, architectural leader, Taxation Administration Service of Mexico, and Christopher D. Preston, senior director, Worldwide Product Marketing TCM, Content Management and Archiving, EMC Corporation, will present Agile Tax Management Using Rules and BPM: Tax Administration Service of Mexico at DIALOG 08 on Monday February 25th from 2:30 pm - 3:15 pm.

This guest post was written by Don Babcock, lead programmer, Wake Forest University (WFU). Don will present a session at DIALOG 08 entitled “Agile and Dynamic Web-based Data Collection: A Case Study in Clinical Trial Data Management” (Tuesday Feb 26, 2:15 pm - 3:00 pm) in which he will discuss how BRMS technology allowed WFU to achieve unprecedented gains in productivity and reliability by truly separating presentation and business logic.

What is a “killer” application? I define it as something that fundamentally changes the way you do things. Most folks of my vintage regard “Visi-Calc” invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston back in the late seventies as the first of the PC “killer apps.” It forever replaced ledger books with an electronic paradigm.

I’ve been around long enough to remember doing ALL my college papers using a typewriter and carbon paper. I’d have KILLED for a word processor! The advent of the word processing engines forever changed the way I wrote.

We used to write our own data structures. In the mid 80’s the popularization of SQL databases changed all that forever.

Of course, who can deny the significance of HTML and the browser given us by Tim Berners-Lee? The Internet itself goes way back if you trace its roots (well before Al Gore ever heard of it) but it didn’t become popular until the 90’s. That’s when the confluence of technologies and interests caused it to achieve critical mass.

For me, the Rules Engine is the latest “killer app” to emerge in my personal history. It truly fits the definition because I would now never dream of trying to build any application of significance without using one for the business “logic” of the application (even if merely for data validation) than I would consider writing anything of significance without using a word processor or a data application without a database. When you “get” it, you’ll never want to go back.

So why do so many programmers still do it the “hard” way? I truly believe that we are on the cusp of this technology achieving “critical mass” in the development community. But I’ll have to save that discussion for my talk at DIALOG 08 and the after blog.

-dB

Thanks for sharing, Don!

About Don Babcock
Don Babcock is an industry veteran with over 35 years experience building data management systems in industry segments, including aviation, banking, chemicals, clinical research, education, insurance, high energy physics research, manufacturing, process control, retail, robotics and utilities. He is a registered professional engineer in the field of electrical engineering. Babcock currently leads several major architectural initiatives involving state-of-the-art applications of rules engine/AI and XML technologies in the field of clinical research data management at WFU.