What Not How: Business Rules Approach to Application Development

This book clearly lays out the case for declarative application development and presents what is required to achieve the next level of development automation. The material is easy to consume and will never be outdated.For those that are "in the trenches", the book's content may seem too far from current reality be useful. The fact is, technology which implements the ideas Date describes, now exist, and will be pervasive shortly. Current model-based code generation tools come close, and there is at least one product that fully realizes Date's suggestions ...Those wishing to stay ahead of the curve will benefit greatly from understanding the fundamental concepts presented in this book.

Having just been exposed to a business rules based product, I am now a believer that this technology and the approach represents the next step in the evolution of application development. This book introduces the concepts nicely and is a good start for those who have no idea about declarative programming. The "rules" approach does not limit the kind of applications you can build to relatively easy systems; indeed this technology is more useful as the requirements become complex. (And they are almost always complex). I am very impressed with the capabilities of the rules based technology I now use. It's not magic and it does not eliminate the need to "hand code". But it does automate the construction of a good deal of the code and will significantly cut the time required to both build and maintain your systems. I recommend this book for everyone that builds or is in some way involved in developing business applications. Step up to the next wave of application automation technology!

You're in IT, your looking for a way forward and OO just doesn't do it for you. You need this book. The revolution's here, the king is dead, the future is relational. Sorry for the hyperbole. I'm biased. I'm a big Date fan. But I've been around a bit (if not as long as Date) and only this hits my buttons. I mean even the net didn't prickle me the way this does. OK, the review. Well the book is short, but it's fantastic presentation material. E.g. the fig on page 52 should be all you need for CEO buy in. For depth you need to look at Date's other books (and read between the lines somewhat). Does it work as an intro to the subject? I'm pretty sure it does, but I'm too familiar with the area to really know.Being critical, I'ld say he does pull his punches somewhat. It maybe his style, but relegating his dismissal of the Object world to one footnote and half a page is somewhat unsatisfactory. Come on Chris, be shriller! Also the proper scope of the subject is neglected. Contrary to appearances, programmers will not be redundant, they're just released writing from tedious code. Cool code will still be needed to implement new datatypes and new functions. Also many apps like spreadsheets (one big non-scalar datatype?) and games will not ever be declarative. But, for me I'm sold. I can easily see a order of magnitude productivity gain possible if we'd used this approach (and if the tools were there) in my present B2B work. For many, I suspect the lack of implementation detail or advice on doing business rules will frustrate. It's not a how-to book, but an appendix of links to business rules sites should have been included.In Summary, a defining book, but the reader needs to buy into the relational vision and will need to look elsewhere for advice on implementing the vision.