In this chapter, we will cover the different aspects of collaboration between processes and other forms of knowledge, particularly rules and events. We will also discuss the importance of rules in the business domain and define what business rules are. To understand how business rules work in jBPM6, we will need to understand how a rule engine works and how it interacts with the jBPM6 process engine, while comparing the way this interaction occurs for jBPM6 and other BPM frameworks. We will discuss all these aspects with a group of examples that will be easy enough to integrate into multiple business scenarios, as well as flexible enough to be extended to cover very complex situations.

After we gain some practice in the rules realm, we will introduce more complex concepts, such as adding temporal information into our rules to define events, time correlation between them, and inferences to detect more complex, indirect events. This will...