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 8. Defining Processes with jBPM

Every nontrivial business process needs to make complex decisions. A rule engine is the ideal place for these decisions to happen. However, it is impractical to invoke a rule engine from a standard workflow engine. Instead, if we take a rule engine and add workflow capabilities, we have an ideal tool such as jBPM to model complex business processes.

The basics of jBPM were already covered in the jBPM section of Chapter 5, Creating Human-readable Rules. We've learned about methods for managing rules execution order; basic components/nodes of a process – start, end, action, ruleflow group, split (diverging gateway), and join (converging gateway).

In this chapter we'll look in more detail at jBPM. We'll build a loan approval process and cover the following advanced concepts of a process: work items, human tasks, faults, subprocesses, events, and others.