Novel uses for Jess

[Jason Menard]

Ernest,
Since Jess is your baby I'm sure you have a certain sense of pride of ownership and are interested in the ways other people use Jess. Have you seen any novel uses of Jess that you didn't really envision when it was created, or that in some way just kinda made you say "wow"? I guess another way to phrase this question is, what's the coolest thing you've seen somebody do with Jess?

[Pradeep bhatt]

Ernest ,
How many guys were behind the development of Jess? Are you alone?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Jason --
That's a great, and hard, question. I have been surprised many times at the things people have done with it, and it's really hard to pick just one or even just a few. The truth is that every application is novel in its own way, and I'm happy to hear about every one.
One family of applications which I didn't envision, but which is being used in several commercial products as well as research prototypes, is in network security scanning analysis. I've seen both packet-level analyzers and smart network scanners that used Jess to monitor and probe computer networks. This is cool because it makes you appreciate how fast Jess is, if it can analyze each packet on a busy IP network.
The "Fact Provider Framework" that allows you to page data in from a database automatically via Jess's backward chaining capabilities was conceived and developed by a gentleman named Thomas Barnekow, and I was blown away when I first saw it.
Bob Orchard's "FuzzyJess" is a set of extensions to Jess that plug in and add fuzzy logic capabilities. The nice thing about FuzzyJess is that versions of FuzzyJess and Jess can vary independently -- it's a plugin rather than a set of source modifications. It shows how much you can do with Jess's public APIs.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Pradeep --
There's just me, and Craig, who handles licensing. Over the years, any other people from the user community have contributed ideas and third-party extensions and thus helped Jess get where it is.