Re: Normalize until neat, Automate until Complete

Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra <leandro_at_dutra.fastmail.fm> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.11.27.10.17.11.887281_at_dutra.fastmail.fm>...
> Em Thu, 25 Nov 2004 15:56:45 -0800, Lauri Pietarinen escreveu:
>
> > I once evaluated a product called Versata, which takes the so called
> > Business Rules approach.
>
> I am curious about it since reading Date's _What not How_. It
> does not push the product, but ends up indirectly indicating using
> Versata may be relationally saner (and simpler to do business with)
> than using directly an SQL DBMS.
>
> Granted we now have the much more ambitious Alphora Dataphor,
> but it suffers from still being MS-only. And Alfredo Novoa's system
> will likely suffer from the same problem, while I understand Versata
> is cross-platform or at least based on POSIX.
>
> So how do you see it?

The product itself was quite hard to install, and it had clearly suffered from having been retrofitted to EJB. I did not do anything very extensive with it, only some small trials.

Creating applications was quite nice and easy, and it was a nice surprise how far you could get without actually coding anything.

Is it relationally saner? Well, the product uses the normal SQL DBMS's as a backend, so I would not put it that way. But it did illustrate for me that even building on current products there is a lot of extra automation that can be achieved.

I would say that to be usefull in the "real world" there are lot's of things that an application development framework has to get right and the approach taken by Versata is very pragmatic.

I would be curious to gain more information on the project mentioned in the Red Book http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246510.pdf.

Best Regards,
Lauri Pietarinen Received on Sat Nov 27 2004 - 23:55:41 CET