Amzi!News, October
2005
ARulesXL: Add Business Rules to Your Excel Spreadsheets
ARulesXL (www.arulesxl.com) turns Microsoft Excel into a powerful tool for delivering business rule applications that combine decision support with computational analysis.
Instead of difficult to code, maintain and understand Excel IF statements, rules are entered directly on your spreasheet in a natural and easy to understand syntax. The rules can then be queried, much like a database.
Rules entered using ARulesXL are:
- Easier to code,
- Easier to maintain,
- More reliable, and
- Easily audited.
(Click Image to Enlarge Screen Shot of rules in Excel at http://www.arulesxl.com/why_rules_spreadsheet.htm)
Price Waterhouse Canada is one of the first commercial users of ARulesXL and is using the product for developing equity compensation analysis tools. Visual Data LLC, vendor of Office Practicum™ pediatric office software, is using ARulesXL for the development and testing of rules used in vaccination planning.
Download the free evaluation version today and browse through the tutorial spreadsheet to see ARulesXL at work on a variety of application ideas, including:
- legal document assembly,
- pricing,
- product advice,
- business rules (incorporation, loan approval, licensing), and
- medical advice (vaccination planning)
www.arulesxl.com
 Amzi! 7.3.1 / Eclipse 3.1 Beta Test
Amzi! 7.3.1 is now available for downloading. It includes the new Eclipse 3.1.1 IDE. (Note, Amzi! 7.3 cannot be used with Eclipse 3.0 as the plugins are not backwards compatible.)
Eclipse 3.1 is faster than 3.0 and supports bi-directional text (BIDI). It also adds a host of ease-of-use enhancements in searching, preferences, view management and more.
On the Amzi! side, we've redefined the meaning of the 'stop' button in the listener and debugger to improve product stability. 'Stop' now terminates Prolog execution, but does not end the Prolog listeners. Also a bug that failed to clear out the old contents of the Prolog listener has been found and fixed, and there are minor changes to the GetHead and UnifyParm LSAPI calls.
Please let us know about any suggestions or problems you encounter at forum.amzi.com or
by email.
 Amzi! Free Edition Removes Time Limit
The 7.3.1 version of Amzi! no longer has a 6 month time limit on the Free Edition. It turns out this was causing too much difficulty for students and professors who tended to use Amzi! Prolog in successive courses.
Building an Eclipse Debugger in Dr. Dobb's Journal
The next issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal features an article by Mary Kroening on Building an Eclipse Debugger. It outlines the features and development of our Prolog source code debugger, and the components that are unique to a backtracking language.
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