In order to start working with rules, there are a couple of things that we need to consider. First of all, we will be relying on Maven to provide the structure for our projects. I strongly recommend you read about Maven if you are not familiar with it as most of the Drools and jBPM infrastructure is nowadays aligned with Maven, therefore, you will feel much more comfortable when you know how it works. I recommend the following link from the Maven project website if you are completely new to the subject:

https://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html

This is not a strong requirement for Drools; however, it is a recommended way to use it. Most of the integration with the project tooling and other modules relies on Maven serving as the standard for project structure and project life cycle and dependency management.

In order to get started, we need to make sure that we have the following software installed on our computer: