Progress revs up BRM with Corticon 6.0
BRM is now a ‘thing’… and it’s not in fact meant to relate to the noise that children make when they pretend to rev up the imaginary engines on their toy cars, instead, it stands for Business Rules Management.
TechTarget defines BRM as a means of improving the efficiency of business processes through decision automation — this, in turn, can reduce dependency on an IT department to make changes to business logic.
Why the explanatory exposition?
Because Bedford Massachusetts-based application development company Progress has this month hit the pedal on the latest release of its Progress Corticon Business Rules Management product.
BRM today is all about what the vendors like to call ‘streamlined business decision management’… and Corticon aims to offer and achieve this with faster support for REST data connectivity, providing a more efficient means of connecting to REST APIs and extracting the data necessary.
As many readers will already know, REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural approach to developing web services built upon Internet-native Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
“The ease with which you can capture, change and optimise the rules that run your business either promotes or inhibits the agility of your organisation. It also impacts the consistency, quality and speed of your decisions – which goes straight to your bottom line,” said John Ainsworth, SVP of core products, Progress.
Ainsworth also points out that his firm has expanded the data integration capabilities of Corticon with the introduction of a new REST data source.
“The amount of data and data sources leveraged across enterprise, mobile and web applications continue to grow exponentially. Because of this, data sources are becoming more disparate, making REST APIs an increasingly popular way to access enterprise data,” notes Ainsworth and company.
By embedding the Progress DataDirect Autonomous REST Connector [a customisable data connectivity software product for codeless connections between applications and REST API data sources], the technology proposition here is that Corticon customer users can connect to the vast variety of data sources necessary to inform digital decision making.
Progress has also provided a new (in fact simpler) architecture for .NET server here — this sees the company work to reduce the burden of cross-compiling.
Cross-compiling
As StackOverflow reminds us, “Cross-compilation is the act of compiling code for one computer system (often known as the target) on a different system, called the host.
It’s a very useful technique, for instance when the target system is too small to host the compiler and all relevant files.”
This (above cross-compiling plus point) means that .NET users now have the architecture flexibility to use both in-process and Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services [formerly Internet Information Server] an extensible web server created by Microsoft) deployment.
Faster BRM for all… the argument is solid enough, but will the connection points between disparate data sources across the business and the web be as smoothly interconnected as Progress promises?
Let’s dig deeper into codeless connections and pursue this subject further.