The Changing User Interface

This article InformationWeek > User Interfaces > The Changing User Interface > September 5, 2005 has an interesting section on AJAX - the combination of Javascript and HTML/XML to generate very dynamic web pages. The one downside with this approach, as practiced by most, is the replication of business rules into user interface code. Thus rules about, say, when I need to have a particular piece of data and when I do not (ask about Hurricane shutters in Florida but not in California) get embedded into Javascript - not the world's most accessible language for business users. What if, instead, you could manage the business rules that impact your user interface in the same way as you manage business rules that execute on your server and GENERATE the AJAX components you need from there? This would let you:

• Manage business rules once
• Deploy them to any platform, server or client
• Allow business users to manage business rules about user interaction without learning Javascript
• Move rules from client to server as you needed to
• Use the same rules to validate an incoming XML stream or a user interaction

Sound like science fiction? Not really, Fair Isaac's business rules solution has an add-on module called SmartForms that does exactly that.