A General Application Engine

Visit the High Level Logic (HLL) Website
— Home of XPL (eXtensible Process Language)
It's like XML, but you can store source code in it.
One of the difficulties in creating a good description of HLL is that most of the good words have already been used. Consider the following.

What is High Level Logic (HLL)?

“High Level Logic” (HLL) occupies a new position in relation to other software development tools and components. What is the highest level of general support that can be given to software development is the theoretical question that drives HLL development. Over the past 25 years, concrete and practical results have developed from this unconventional approach to envisioning the next generation of software tools.

HLL is a software framework for developing a very large number of applications, linking applications and components that have already been created, facilitating relationships between people and organizations, for interacting with people and their agents, and increasing automation of pretty much anything. In short, it does what modern applications should do; and makes an entire infrastructure easier to develop and maintain.

The opening paragraph and accompanying graphic were added to a document to clarify what HLL is; putting readers on the right track right from the start. But now suddenly, there's a contradiction. The paragraph following the graphic says that "HLL is a software framework." The graphic itself places frameworks two levels down from High Level Logic. Readers can be left wondering, which is it?

To me, this is more than just an editorial problem. It's part of a general problem in developing the language that describes computer systems and software components. Another example in HLL is the use of the term "experts." My use of the term is directly related to the definition found in English language dictionaries. I clarify by calling HLL experts, "HLL experts." For those familiar with AI, the term automatically causes one to wonder whether they're the same thing as rule-based expert system components.

I believe I can use the term framework to describe HLL. I believe it fits existing definitions and uses of the term software framework. But as the graphic shows, I think there's a need to make a distinction between HLL's position on the level-of-logic chart verses the many examples of frameworks that I'm currently familiar with. Knowing that any new terminology is one more thing to explain, I still think it's worth trying to come up with a new term.

The first thing I thought of was that HLL is an application engine. It clearly fits earlier uses of the term "engine" to describe software systems that drive applications by processing application components that have been expressed as data. (Rule-processing engine, for example.)

Ther term comes rather close to Google's App Engine and PeopleSoft's Application Engine. Google's App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. PeopleSoft's Application engine is a batch processing system using blocks of PeopleCode and SQL.

Both the Google and the PeopleSoft "engines" are much more specialized than HLL, so to make the distinction, HLL can be called a general application engine.

What do you think?

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