Book Image

Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide

By : Michal Bali
Book Image

Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide

By: Michal Bali

Overview of this book

<p>Writing business rules has always been a challenging task. Business rules tend to change often leading to a maintenance nightmare. This book shows you various ways to code your business rules using Drools, the open source Business Rules Management System.<br /><br />Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide shows various features of the Drools platform by walking the reader through several real-world examples. Each chapter elaborates on different aspects of the Drools platform. The reader will also learn about the inner workings of Drools and its implementation of the Rete algorithm.<br /><br />The book starts with explaining rule basics, then builds on this information by going through various areas like human readable rules, rules for validation, and stateful rules, using examples from the banking domain. A loan approval process example shows the use of the jBPM module. Parts of a banking fraud detection system are implemented with the Drools Fusion module which is the complex event processing part of Drools. Finally, more technical details are shown detailing the inner workings of Drools, the implementation of the ReteOO algorithm, indexing, node sharing, and partitioning.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Development Environment
Creating Custom Operators
Dependencies of Sample Application
Index

Static analysis of rules


Testing is useful but it can be very time-consuming. We have to write the test and then maintain them. It would be nice if we also had some automatic way of testing.

Static analysis is what we're looking for. It is another powerful technique that can be used anytime for achieving high quality of rules. The rules are analyzed by a specialized program without actually running it. It can be applied to any rules without any initial investments.

Drools comes with a module called drools-verifier that uses rules to analyze rules. This module can be used standalone (through API or as an ant task) or it is also included in Guvnor under QA | Analysis. Analysis can be started by clicking on the Run analysis button. The results are shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 6: Analyzing a package

Drools-verifier module analyzes rules in a package and creates a report with errors, warnings, and notes. Furthermore, it provides various other information about rules (for example, field...