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

Chapter 4. Transforming Data

Almost any rewrite of an existing legacy system needs to do some kind of data transformation with the old legacy data before it can be used in the new system. It needs to load the data and transform them so that they meet the requirements of the new system and finally store them. This is just one example of where data transformation is needed.

Drools can help us with this data transformation task as well. Depending on our requirements it might be a good idea to isolate this transformation process in the form of rules. The rules can be reused later, maybe when our business will expand and we'll be converting data from a different third-party system. Of course, other advantages of using rules apply.

If performance is the most important requirement (for example, all data has to be converted within a specified time frame), rules may not be the ideal approach. Probably, the biggest disadvantage of using rules is that they need the legacy data in memory, so they are...