Well, well, the Rational story is getting interesting. According to this story, Microsoft is also bidding on Rational. That's interesting. Well, one of the two will end up supporting the overblown, heavyweight cruft that is RUP, and the other will have another chance to look at the Agile side of things. Should be interesting either way, I think. [Cincom Smalltalk Blog]

I figured Rational built XDE IDE based on Eclipse because it got scared by Microsoft's acquisition of Visio. Visio is Rose done in 'worse is better' way. (Well, not that Rose is good in any sense!)

11:27:16 AM  #  

Action-Based Discretization: From Games to the Enterprise?.

The problem: Most software used in large organizations (business, academic, government, etc.) is complex only at the level of implementation -- the real behavior is simple. Invoices are totaled. Invoices are mailed. Accounts are balanced. Appointments are made in a deterministic fashion. ("If exchange server shows her available at 10:20 tomorrow, schedule her to meet with the downsizing committee").
The gaming world frequently addresses more interesting issues. These days game developers study physics (what passes for) AI. The problems of moving a ship through space may have more in common with processing
an invoice or an appointment than one might expect.

A limted solution: For example, software that supports workflow is being used for more sophisticated approaches for handling invoices and appointments. (IBM, Microsoft, Bea are working on Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) and other flow specifications). The specifications attempt to handle well defined interactions. It’s not clear, however, that ‘well defined’ is good enough to support rich behavior in an organizational context in which personnel,
organizational relationships (partners, competitors, etc.), and requirements are constantly shifting.

A deeper solution? Metaphors from the physical world may be more appropriate and the game developers may have a leg up.

 

 

[Contours]

and game developers know how to build agent based systems -- some games contain alot of autonomous agents. XREF: Steve Johnson's article from Wired.

8:51:57 AM  #