Chapter 1, Expert: The Rule Engine, will introduce you to new features available in the 5.2.0 release and in the previous releases to improve your expertise with the main Drools module.

Chapter 2, Expert: Behind the Rules, will cover more recipes for Drools Expert, and you will learn different ways to persist the knowledge and the use of the Drools Verifier project. You will also learn how to monitor Drools using JMX, and so on.

Chapter 3, Guvnor: Centralized Knowledge Management, contains recipes that use the Drools Guvnor as your knowledge repository using new authoring methods.

Chapter 4, Guvnor: Advanced Features and Configuration, will teach you how to back up and configure the rules repository in order to use an external database, how to interact with Guvnor using the REST API, and so on.

Chapter 5, Fusion: Processing Complex Events, will get you started with the Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Drools Fusion concepts to add event processing capabilities to your project.

Chapter 6, Executing Drools Remotely, will introduce to you all the concepts and requirements needed to use and test the Drools Server module to execute your business rules remotely using the HTTP protocol, which will enable you to interact with it using different programming languages.

Chapter 7, Integration: How to Connect Drools, covers all the possible integrations between Drools, the Spring Framework, and Apache Camel to create declarative services.

Chapter 8, Planner: Optimizing Your Automated Planning, will teach you how to optimize automated planning problems using the Drools Planner module, covering a step-by-step explanation of the configuration possibilities and how to benchmark it to improve your solution.

Chapter 9, jBPM5: Managing Business Processes, will show you how to use some features of the new jBPM5 project, such as BPMN2 process creation using the API, and testing, monitoring, and report creation.

The recipes in this cookbook assume that you know the Java language pretty well and also that you have basic JBoss Drools knowledge. The latter is really important because the basic business rules authoring process and concepts aren't the main focus and we are going straight ahead into the recipes. If you do not have basic knowledge of JBoss Drools, you should consider reading Drools JBoss Rules 5.0 Developer's Guide, published by Packt, before this book. Also, you will have to know how to create Apache Maven projects to follow the recipes, and it is recommended to know about frameworks such as the Spring Framework, Apache Camel, Hibernate, and so on. However, if you don't know them don't worry because they will be minimally explained in the recipes.

This book is for experienced Java developers and architects who want to improve their current knowledge about the JBoss Drools project and also want to discover new features that can be applied in their projects.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "This method returns an org.drools.definition.type.FactType object that is used to communicate with the KnowledgeBase in order to create instances of your facts."

A block of code is set as follows:

package drools.cookbook;

import drools.cookbook.model.FlightStatus
import drools.cookbook.model.FlightControl

global drools.cookbook.model.FlightControl control;

declare FlightStatus
    @role(event)
    @timestamp(timestamp)
end

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

WorkingMemoryEntryPoint flightArrivalEntryPoint = ksession
    .getWorkingMemoryEntryPoint("flight-arrival");
flightArrivalEntryPoint.insert(flightStatus);
clock.advanceTime(7, TimeUnit.MINUTES);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Error: Restriction LiteralRestriction from rule [rule 2] value '== 2' and LiteralRestriction from rule [rule 2] value '!= 2'are in conflict. Because of this, pattern that contains them can never be satisfied. type: INCOHERENCE on: Pattern, name: Server

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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