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

External artifact building


We already know that we can use Guvnor to build packages externally. In this section we'll look how to do it with a build tool called Ant. We can then easily add an artifact compilation step into our existing build process that we may have.

Note that in future versions the Drools team is planning to add support for Maven as well. If you're running Maven, as a workaround it is possible to call an Ant task from within a Maven build.

Building with Ant

Apache Ant is a general-purpose building tool. More information about Ant can be found at http://ant.apache.org/. Module drools-ant, from the droolsjbpm-tools-distribution-5.5.0.Final.zip downloadable file contains an Ant task for building Drools artifacts. We'll build the validation knowledge base from Chapter 3, Validating, using this Ant task.

All information required by Ant will be stored in a file called build.xml. We'll now go step-by-step through this file. It starts with a project definition:

<?xml version="1.0...