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Oct 14 2008:: A new subject ... maybe a new category.

In some ways, business rule languages represent the "soft underbelly" of the business rules approach. They can be arcane pseudo-languages reserved for highly trained specialists, which tends to defeat the original purpose of business rules and limit their value to business people.

Republished Jan 16 2009, from a an old tutorial article. Will be expanded and revised in coming months. Also see InterWiki on Logical Reasoning.

Best practices for business rules.

Updated Sept 7 2008: created

In Search of a Definition

First note that there really are no good definitions of business rule methodology available - the main link is to Wikipedia's definition of business rules, where they state simply "Business Rules Methodology is the process of capturing business rules in English, in real-time while empowering users to manage rules with a few simple steps". What are the simple steps that empowering users to manage rules ? And do they really have to be in English ?

Note: moved from the Development site Sept 24 2008. small edits

The Oasis standards organization published a Reference Model for SOA ( Service Oriented Architecture ) not too long ago. In it, they compared SOA and OO ( Object-Oriented ) technologies. While I don't agree with them entirely ( or even mostly ) on the strengths and weaknesses of SOA versus OO technology, here is an extended quote of what they have to offer on the subject.

Updated Oct 20 2008:

There were some interesting responses to an article at the athico.com blog site about rule engine performance.

A comment by Greg Barton outlines a disaster story about the inappropriate use of a rule engine to implement transaction processing for a large telecom application.

Updated Sept 12 2008: moved from Devel site, added new links.

I must admit that I have been skeptical about the utility of full-featured, full-blown business process languages, especially for use in what I anticipate to be a simplified interface for the Semantic Web. If the language isn't fairly intuitive, people just aren't going to understand it.

W6 vocabularies ( ontologies ) allow resource descriptions and reasoning based on the 6 questions : who, why, what, when, where, and how. ( better called "W5-H" ? )

One of the hot areas for cross-fertilization these days is business rules and service oriented architecture.

Business rule and object technology veteran Ian Graham has written an excellent book on the subject titled Business Rules Management and Service Oriented Architecture: A Pattern Language.

Revised Sept 7-12 2008: Added IBM and many other links

This site is primarily about open source solutions, so the honor of precedence goes to the Open SOA Collaboration. The organization is not very active, but it moves along over time.

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