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

Loan approval process


We'll now define this process in jBPM. It is shown in the following figure. Try to remember this figure, because we'll be referring back to it throughout this chapter:

Figure 2: Loan approval process – the loanApproval.bpmn file

You can use the BPMN2 process editor that comes with the Drools Eclipse plugin to create this process. The rest of the chapter will walk you through this process, explaining each node in more detail. The screenshot shown has been taken using the Default skin. This skin has been chosen because it shows the node names (the other skins don't), which makes the explanation a lot easier. Normally, you'd use the BPMN2 process skin. You can change the process skin in Eclipse when you go to Window | Preferences | Drools, then select from the Preferred process skin drop-down list.

The process starts with the Validate Loan rule task (also called rule flow group). The rules in this group will check the loan for missing required values and do other more complex...