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

jBPM


Processes can also help us toward more human-readable rules. It is not a substitute to rules as was the case with DSLs and decision tables. It is a way of defining the execution flow between complex rules. The rules are then easier to understand.

With jBPM we can externalize the execution order from the rules. The execution order can then be managed externally. Potentially, you may define more execution orders for one KnowledgeBase object.

jBPM is a process engine, a standalone product that is very closely integrated with Drools. It can execute arbitrary actions or user-defined work items at specific points within the process. It can even be persisted, as we'll see in Chapter 8, Defining Processes with jBPM, which shows a bigger example of using processes.

Drools agenda

Before we talk about how to manage rule execution order, we have to understand Drools Agenda. When a object is inserted into the knowledge session, Drools tries to match this object with all the possible rules. If a rule...