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

Node sharing


We've already touched on node sharing when we went through the rule from Code listing 3. Node sharing is one of the techniques used to minimize the size of the Rete network. The more nodes two rules share, the better. We already know that the order of conditions within a rule and even the order of constraints within a single condition affects the order of nodes within the Rete network and so affects the sharing of nodes.

The node sharing takes place when the network is built, that is, when we're creating a knowledge base out of knowledge packages. The node sharing is implemented very simply by using the equals method of the standard Object class. When a new rule is added into an existing network, new nodes are created as if the network was empty. These nodes are then inserted into the existing network. When this happens, the algorithm checks if such a node already exists by using the equals method. Only the appropriate nodes are being examined at the current level within the...