Martin Fowler’s Refactoring to an Adaptive Model, 11/2015 – replacing imperative logic with a declarative one, with rules encoded in JSON so that they can easily be shared across platforms and updated without re-installation. A few other nice refactoring points too.
Most of our software logic is written in our programming languages, these give us the best environment to write and evolve such logic. But there are circumstances when it’s useful to move that logic into a data structure that our imperative code can interpret – what I refer to as an adaptive model. Here I’ll show some product selection logic in JavaScript and show how it can be refactored to a simple production rule system encoded in JSON. This JSON data allows us to share this selection logic between devices using different programming languages and to update this logic without updating the code on these devices.
