Business Natural Language Ruby Systems

Jay Fields

Presented by: Jay Fields

Talk Description

A Business Natural Language is a Domain Specific Language where subject matter experts use natural language to represent business logic. For example, a marketing executive for an airline could specify point award descriptions as: "award 1 point for each mile flown where the total flight length is greater than 500 miles"

The above example reads as specification; however, the code is also executable. By providing a language that subject matter experts are comfortable working with several benefits are achieved, the two largest being:

  • The business may change its rules without intervention of a programmer
  • Programmers no longer need to spend their time trying to represent the logic of a business in lower level languages and can focus on other more interesting tasks

Bio

Jay Fields is a software developer at ThoughtWorks. He is a early adopter who is consistantly looking for new exciting technologies. His most recent work has been in the Domain Specific Language space where he delivered applications that empowered subject matter experts to write the business rules of the applications.