"The book is a brilliant synergy of theory and experience. Filled with fundamental concepts together with innovative and yet very practical approaches to modern software engineering, it answers the most important questions of today and allows us to look into the future."

"Thank you for giving your speech at ATR, New Zealand. Your idea of using a knowledge base to create a prepositional programming environment is something which I had never considered before... This will be a revolutionary computing system, it will be the first truly general prepositional computing environment, which is such a cool idea. "

Armed with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Expression Language (BPEL), and Web Services, the software industry seems to be moving at a fast pace. Nevertheless, some of the foundations of the field have stayed static for many years.

We have not changed the way we write software over the past twenty years.

We have not moved far from the UNIX operational environment (which was a big hit thirty years ago).

We add power to computers but fail to add a bit of common sense. There is no "formal" mechanism for knowledge capture and inheritance.

It takes multiple layers and teams to translate business requirements into the Boolean Logic of programming languages and to bake it all together with generic and specific services. The resulting cake is too firm in spite of its name - Software.

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However, best practices in software and knowledge engineering can turn things around. Upcoming advances in our most basic foundations will allow us to break out of our current bonds.

Moving to knowledge-driven architectures, we can finally stop re-writing the traditional set of inventory, scheduling, and order systems.

We will enhance development tools and dramatically increase the population of their users by allowing business people (non-programmers) to apply their expertise and directly participate in application development.

We will increase the efficiency of consulting practices by capturing specific business domains in conversational sessions, getting our client requirements not only more quickly, but far more precisely, directly transforming these requirements into business rules and scenarios driving applications.

We might even open up a new world of applications that can inherit and learn rules, events, and scenarios, helping us build adaptable systems, retrieve knowledge from electronic documents, create new generations of control and simulation, pattern recognition, decision making systems, and more.

Our guest, who has authored several patents and publications and spoken at Java One and other events, will share his work on the integration of best software development practices with knowledge engineering, and discuss the possibility of practical applications at our workplace.

About the author:
Jeff Zhuk is the president of ITS, Inc. (http://JavaSchool.com). He is a speaker at the Java One and Wireless One conferences, a software architect, educator, and developer with over twenty years of experience. Jeff has numerous patents and publications, teaches at the University of Phoenix and at DeVry University, and conducts corporate consulting and training. His recent book on Software and Knowledge Engineering, published by Cambridge University Press, pulls together many new developments in software architecture to bridge the gap to a new generation of software applications.