cheers, Collectivism!!!

This is exactly wht production systems/rule based systems are designed to do, no?

The website at the moment is just a first stab at getting this information out. Soon I will have another 2 chapters up which will complete the basic instruction on how to build Software Circuits.

I don’t have any language specific examples yet. However, for each piece of visual notation, I’ve provided a “code mechanism” in a generic form of pseudocode that should map to most (all?) OO languages.

So for the moment, it is a by hand affair.

However, we are actively developing a free tool which will be released within a couple of months, I hope, that will provide generated code in as many languages as we can get the XSLts made for.

And yes, the state machine approach only applies to complex, stateful software. A lot of code for the web these days doesn’t need this approach because the web pages themselves already act just like a state. The code on the server is the “Action” code + a little bit of “Transition” decision logic to decide what page to go to next based on the result of the Action.

There are also other “trivial” objects – objects that just act as data repositories and don’t have any real state.

And then there are the objects with two or three states that aren’t that complex, and it is a toss-up, when doing them by hand, if it is worth it to implement all the machinery to do a proper state machine.

With the tool, I hope to change that math to be very favorable to going the state machine route. Please keep checking back.

Mark

Can you comment on other implementations of HSM, such as the Quantum Frameworks?

In the past I’ve been on development teams where we’ve implemented simple versions of what you show here – state machine visual design tools which spit out XML, which is then translated into . They were very successful for obvious state machine components, but less so in other areas. We started to find that there were new design patterns which needed to be learned to create HSMs to ensure they were understandable and correct.

Anyway, nice to see people thinking about the way we represent design.

Cheers, Coopsnakes.

In manufacturing typically an individual will have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of equipment making the worker more productive. In most software shops, they throw you a computer (and usually an under powered one) a compiler or two and a text editor at you and tell you to get on with it.