I've been away for a long time. For that, I am sorry. But, now I am back.

What's been on my mind lately is whether its possible to encode a business intention in an intermediary language and then build an interpreter to read this language. One system would encode an intention, the second system would evaluate it. Interesting, no? Perhaps, all this means is that system A sends a message to system B. System B reads the message and based on hard-coded business rules performs the work. But, let's say there are no hard-coded business rules. Let's say the message is the rules and the data. Would that be possible? What would this language look like. It would need to contain meta-data that could be evaluated and mapped to business rules. Let's step back a little. What's the point of this. System B is a specific system that does a specific thing. It should know what to do with the message without needing System A to tell it. A new trade message arrives, your system receives the trade. It knows its a new trade, because it says so on the message. What is the action, book the trade. So, your system dynamically looks up all the supported actions, and passes the data-set to that rule-set. Now, some of you are thinking, great, all this and he describes a bloody factory pattern. But wait, forget messages. It's an event. Something, some how raises an event that says there is a new action with the given payload. Some controller accepts the event and routes it to the appropriate implementation for that event, or perhaps a set of implementations, or even better triggers the work-flow. Now, we're getting somewhere. The event name maps to a business intention, which is specified as a work-flow. But, the work-flow is a generic concept. It's not real unless there is code behind it. So, we build a bunch of modularized code that does specific functions, we wire it together with dependency injection and have a dynamic work-flow define the execution path.