The title of this chapter could be offensive to some developers. Aren't all the rules we have covered so far human-readable? Aren't we humans? The idea behind this chapter is to introduce other ways to define rules in Drools that are more user-friendly. In this chapter, "human" means a non-technical person.

So far, we have covered a single way to define rules and knowledge: the DRL language. This language—even if powerful—is inappropriate, most of the time, for users without a technical background. And even then, DRL requires a certain amount of time to become familiar with it. Drools provides other means of knowledge creation by supporting different abstractions over DRL that make the language simpler.

Having a simpler and more concrete language provides us with a great advantage: we can include Subject Matter Experts (SME) in the development cycle. Business requirements no longer have to be translated into technical artifacts (such as classes, rules, and so...