www.amzi.com

2011-11-01

Welcome - new release 9-5-2 available
UTF-8 Support - easy I/O for national language Web applications
Retro IDE - the original Amzi! Windows IDE is back
The Prolog Edge - the advantages of Prolog

Welcome

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In this issue we describe the latest release, 9-5-2, which includes the retro Windows interactive development environment (WIDE) included in Amzi! before we went to Eclipse. It also includes UTF-8 support for building online applications in multiple national languages. You can download the software today.

As always, we encourage institutes of learning to purchase our education site licenses to provide access to the full Amzi! Prolog + Logic Server for all students and faculty.

UTF-8 Support

The latest release includes support for I/O UTF-8 encoding. This makes it easier to build and deploy Web-based applications in various national languages. Here's a screen shot from a prototype of an online traditional Chinese medicine application:

Traditional Chinese Medicine being developed using Amzi! Prolog + Logic Server

Retro IDE

Back at the version 6 level of Amzi! Prolog, there was a relatively simple IDE included with the Windows version of the software. It let you edit, run and debug Prolog programs. As we kept working on increasing it's power, we learned about the Java-based extendable Eclipse IDE. Given Amzi!'s easy integration with Java, it was an easy decision to build a Prolog plug-in for Eclipse that supported projects, cross referencing, tool tips, syntax color, and, most important, a full color-coded source code debugger that tracks Prolog's backtracking execution and variable binding and unbinding.

The downside of Eclipse is that it is a full professional development environment, and there is some learning overhead required to get started with it. There are those who missed the easy, simpler IDE of yore, especially students pressed for time with some Prolog assignments to do.

So, the original Windows IDE is now included, along with the full Eclipse IDE, in the distribution. It's available in a 16-bit wideA.exe and 32-bit wideW.exe character encoding.

The Original Amzi! Windows IDE, now included in the 9-5-2 distribution.

The Prolog Edge

Prolog provides a competitive edge for applications with a knowledge-base component.

Consider VacLogic, the vaccine analysis and forecasting tool embedded in the Office Practicum pediatric electronic medical records application. Other vendors offer vaccination forecasting as well, but they are unable to handle the complex corner cases that VacLogic does, nor can they respond as quickly to the constantly changing guidelines for vaccinations.

Anyone can program the standard four dose sequence of Pneumococcal Conjugage Vaccine (PCV), but to do the correct analysis and forecast for late starts and/or missing dose situations is more complex, with multiple tables and rules for handling each of those cases. With Prolog, the knowledge representation and reasoning is customized to make it very easy to handle these as well as new vaccines and schedules as they come out. HPV vaccine, for example, was incorporated in the system in less than an hour after it was recommended.

Prolog is a powerful tool for startups looking for an edge in the marketplace. A number of small companies have used Prolog to develop software that provides services above and beyond what is practical with conventional tools. These startups have then been purchased by larger companies.

One of Amzi!'s customers was a small startup that offered commercial shipping advisor application based on the Amzi! shipping advisor sample. They then sold the company to a larger company that wanted the special edge this application would bring to their shipping decisions.

Another small company was using Prolog to implement powerful and flexible mortgage pricing capabilities for it's customer banks. The ease with which it adapted to changes made it possible for them to provide customized mortgage packaging for each customer bank. They were acquired by a larger financial institution, again, based on the power and flexibility of their Prolog-based software. The acquiring institution had never even considered offering customized mortgage packaging to it's customer banks. No in-house technology had ever given them that capability.

There are many such stories in the Prolog world. The incredible ability to customize both knowledge representation and reasoning makes Prolog a very powerful tool for dealing with the knowledge-based components of applications, such as vaccination forecast, shipping advice and mortgage pricing.

The ease with which Amzi! Prolog can be embedded in other application contexts makes it the perfect tool for integrating Prolog knowledge-based components in larger application contexts.