Making Better Decisions in Your Applications

In a traditional imperative programming model, a developer explicitly instructs the runtime engine what to do through statements, conditional structures, and loops. In this context, an application's business logic is embedded in the developer code, and any change in the business logic implies a code update and a complete release cycle. However, there are some complex problems where imperative programming cannot provide a satisfactory solution within a reasonable time. One approach to solving such kinds of problems is to rely on expert systems and constraint optimization tools. It is at this level that declarative programming takes place; instead of telling it what to do, as in imperative programming, the developer tells the system how to solve the problem through structured rules. The system then applies various pattern matching...