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Links - Drools

Drools is probably the leading Open Source Java rule engine and rule management environment. It is the community version of commercial JBoss Rules. The whole operation os very solid - the Drools/JBoss Rules User Guide is among the best of any business rules product, either open source or commercial.

The following is a heavily paraphrased version of the three main points on Drools site:

  • Business Rules - Drools is a business rule management system (BRMS) and an enhanced Rules Engine implementation. A web based BRMS system provides GUIs for managing rule assets built from the ground up for advanced rule authoring, version control, and management.. GUIs and visual metaphors (RuleFlow, Decision tables in Spreadsheets) also reduce the gap between business and IT.
  • Application Development - Drools includes a powerful forward and backward chainiing rule engine based on Charles Forgy's Rete algorithm. The Rete algorithm, and its descendents such as Drools' Reteoo, provide speed and scalability beyond what is practical to achieve and maintain by hand. and a package of graphical editing tools,web based tools and developer productivity tools. An Eclipse plugin makes it easier to use Drools, with intellisense auto-completion and Debug views, rule flow GUIs and more.
  • Enterprise Integration - Drools provides for Declarative Programming and is flexible enough to match the semantics of your problem domain with Domain Specific Languages. The development environment is tailored primarily for the Java language. A deployment framework known as the "Rule Agent" can work with the BRMS, or a drools-ant task to automate deployment of rules into your runtime systems.

 

The JBoss RoadMap describes some interesting features for the future.

Short goals (Q1/Q2) are broadly:

* Rule Analysis
* Rule Scenario Testing
* Web Based Decisoin tables
* BRMS improvements (security, svn/eclipse integration)
* Medium term goals (Q2/Q3)
* Ontology Modelling
* Temporal Reasoning
* Backward Chaining
* Further BRMS enhancements
* Decision Services - Autodeployment of Rules as services with minimal or no code (will be bundled with the BRMS)

 

Note that Drools 4.0 has a new BRMS, basic info about it can be found in the JBoss 4.0 technical documentation ( multi-meg HTML file ).

 

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