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Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 17:16:51 -0700
From: student <no-s...@nowhere.net>
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Subject: Re: Business Rules in Prolog
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Massimiliano Campagnoli wrote:
> We are designing a finite capacity scheduling system for our
> manufacturing job shop, based on standard dispatching rules (SPT, EDD,
> COVERT, FIFO,  etc.) and more tailored heuristics. The system will
> access our relation database via ODBC interface.
> Prolog seems a good candidate to  implement this system but we are
> pretty concerned on how to develop in Prolog the user interface, like
> dialogs for data entry, capacity graphs and interactive gantt-charts.
> We have tried XPCE/Prolog and it seems to fit the purpose, even if
> documentations and examples are very concise.
> The alternative would be to use Prolog only for the business rule
> engine and leave the GUI to a more "procedural" language with a good
> documented GUI library (e.g. C++ and QT). This second approach would
> raise the problem of how to integrate the C++ GUI with Prolog.
> Any comment and suggestion would me much appreciated.
> 

   Massimiliano,

   I suggest you consider using Visual Prolog. To get a sense of what it 
might be like to develop your application in Visual Prolog, you might visit

             http://www.ezy-software.com/

and download their EZY Prolog Suite, which is itself implemented in
Visual Prolog.

   My second suggestion would be that you consider using Actor Prolog 
[see attached], but I am not sure what the current status of that
effort is today. What I do know is that I was very favorably impressed 
by what I saw when I took a look at it a couple of years ago. [I 
uploaded a copy of the Windows beta version that I am referring to, here:
<http://www.geocities.com/logic4sure/TLM/Actor_Prolog_Version_2005.10.20_beta-setup1.exe.gz>).]

   As I understand it, the ability to interface with major design
specification methodologies such as SADT and Dia (not sure about Gantt)
was an important part of the definition of Actor Prolog at the design
stage.

    Good luck!

billh
-- 
"Identity of object I express by identity of sign, and not by using a sign
for identity. Difference of objects I express by difference of signs."
Ludwig Wittgenstein *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus* 5:53
