I agreed to do a lunch and learn on Inform 7 at Accenture in their CIO architecture group. This came up in a conversation about IF and my indulgences and the two guys in charge of the lunch and learn schedule were excited about the idea of doing a “gaming” event.
That said, I would like to tie this to business concepts in some minimal fashion. I had thought to talk about the rules engine and possibly relations as the basis for interesting things you might do in Inform 7 as a portion of a business process.
This is not necessarily meant to use I7 in a business, but to talk about some of the features of IF coding in I7 that may translate to business processes.
If anyone has any thoughts, I’d appreciate it.
The presentation is an hour, mostly heads down coding to show aspects of Inform 7. Not sure how far I’ll get, but if I have the right piece of code, I can make it through quickly. Maybe you could suggest which examples might be the simplest and most interesting from a programming perspective.
So, full disclosure. My day job is CTO of a reasonably sized software company. One of the reasons I began looking at Inform 7 was to gain some ideas around an ‘in application’ scripting engine that is simple for users to develop their own data access / workflow scripts with.
We had been looking at graphical engines, including, actually, Scratch (scratch.mit.edu/) and Kodu. As well as the usual suspects - business objects, RoR and so on.
The idea of a ‘natural language’ approach to user scripting appealed to me. Hence I began playing about with Inform 7. (It also helped that I have a history with IF).
In addition, we have an embedded help function within our application suite. At the minute, we use a chat bot (there are several commercially available) but I was also thinking about whether I7 might provide a reasonably powerful way of scripting chat responses, and, potentially, adding some color to automated interactions through ‘personality’.
Hope this is useful.
McT
(n.b. at least this is my excuse for working on my IF Comp entry at work! )
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