We are researching Blaze Advisor for handling our business rules and accessing them via COM from within both our VFP apps, Delphi, and WebSphere apps as well.

Our apps run on IBM (AS400) as well as MSFT systems so this is a real possibility for us. We are passing information between the different platforms on a daily basis but running rules management at both locations.

Some of the benefits of Blaze Advisor seem to be the ability to access those rules from almost any language and any environment including IBM, Unix, MSFT, etc. Additionally, the rules can be created using many different languages including VB, C#, C++, Java, etc. Supposedly it supports both stateless as well as stateful connections too. Multi-threading, etc.

Anyone out there using Blaze Advisor? What happens when the client loses connection? Are the rules downloaded to the client or is there a pending connection out there waiting for a reconnect? Any ideas? The company will provide examples of calling/accessing the Blaze Rules from any language you request. The primary benefits would be realized down the road in ease of maintenance as well as centrally managed business rules (discounting the manhours/cost involved in setting up the rules initially and recoding existing apps on different platforms to call these rules).

Sounds like a very good product but I have not seen a live example in the real world. Anyone using it?

Tracy