Drools Team to be at Dallas Rules Fest (Oct 22-24)
The entire Drools team will be at the Dallas Rules Fest http://rulesfest.org/ this October 22nd to 24th. This is a must attend non-profit event, with $150 registration fee, for hands on rule training on a variety of products and disciplines with some top industry speakers and a fantastic agenda - just stuff, not fluff ;) Gary Riley will be there, author of the rules "bible" Expert Systems, talking about his rule engine the venerable Clips. Charles Forgy, the inventor of Rete and "father" of rule engines, will be there talking about his break through research in parallel executing rule engines. Daniel Selman from Ilog will be there giving tutorials on the ilog engine and tooling. The Drools team will actually be arriving the week before, on the 15th, for our team meeting which is open to all. So if you want to chat rules in general or specifically on your problems, or just get involved in some hard core programming, please do come along. We will be staying at the Best Western hotel which has rooms from just $69USD per night :) So far we have Franklin American and German Aerospace Center joining us for the team meeting and hard core Drools coding, and Fedex on the tuesday - still room for more :)
Drools
Drools is a business rule management system (BRMS) and an enhanced Rules Engine implementation, ReteOO, based on Charles Forgy's Rete algorithm tailored for the Java language. More importantly, Drools provides for Declarative Programming and is flexible enough to match the semantics of your problem domain with Domain Specific Languages, graphical editing tools, web based tools and developer productivity tools.
Why Choose Drools
| Open Source | Drools has a business friendly open source license that makes it free to download, use, embed, and distribute. |
| Declarative Programming | Allow you to say "What to do" not "How to do it". |
| Accessible business rules | Drools is friendly to both developers and business users. DSLs allow developers to write almost natural language semantics for rule authors. GUIs and visual metaphors (RuleFlow, Decision tables in Spreadsheets) also reduce the gap between business and IT. A web based BRMS (Business Rule Management System) provides GUIs for managing rule assets. |
| Logic and Data Separation | Rule engines are the ultimate in logic and data de-coupling. Increases maintainability and codebase quality. |
| Speed and Scalability | The Rete algorithm, and its descendents such as Drools' Reteoo, provide speed and scalability beyond what is practical to achieve and maintain by hand. |
| Eclipse IDE | Eclipse plugin makes it easier than ever to use Drools, with intellisense auto-completion and Debug views, rule flow GUIs and more. |
| Web based BRMS | AJAX-based business rules management system (BRMS), built from the ground up for advanced rule authoring, version control, and management. |
Portugese DSL in action
How to get started:
The links up the top left provide all the info you need - Documentation, Downloads and the Wiki etc. Feature requests and bugs are tracked in the JIRA issue tracking system (its quick to create your own account). Don't forget to take a look at the LiveTrails for videos, and the blog to keep up with the latest.
Technical rules
Drools provides a rich language and advanced constructs for solving hard algorithmic problems. There is also a helpful plug in for Eclipse (IDE). Rules are (normally) written in this way in the "drl" language, which is fully documented (and many examples are available in the downloads and documentation). 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.
Business rules
For those interested in business rules, of particular interest will be:
- Web Based BRMS (see the screen shots or the Live Trails)
- Decision tables
- DSLs
The BRMS is provided as a separate download (it is a web based application).
Thanks To:
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EJ-Technologies provide licenses for JProfiler for free, for the JBoss Drools project. |
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JetBrains has donated an IntelliJ license for use on opensource Drools projects.. |
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nexB are the preferred Eclipse development partner for Drools. |