Agile Ajax

GWT Showcase - BRMS for JBoss Rules

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, June 19, 2008 @ 9:06 pm

JBoss Rules (the former "Drools," though it's sad to see that cringe-inducing name making a comeback) is a Business Rules Engine (BRE). Those are the logic engines that allow you to execute a large set of "if-then" rules against a large set of facts (the most common algorithm to achieve this kind of performance is called RETE, from the ancient Greek for "net"). For more on BRE's and how to use them, have a look at our Business Rules blog.

One of the things that has differentiated commercial BRE's like Blaze Advisor and ILOG JRules from the Open Source JBoss Rules is the tools. The commercial BRE's were part of a suite of development and management tools -- IDE's, "natural" language support, Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) -- that made their use in a corporate IT "ecosystem" much easier.

With version 4 of JBoss Rules, you now get a powerful workbench plugin for Eclipse, support for Domain Specific Languages (DSL) that mimick natural language, and a web-based BRMS. With it you can deploy, roll back, and report on your rules.

The BRMS has a nice Ajax interface and is in fact written in GWT. This is a natural for a Java-based system like JBoss Rules. If the developers who use and develop JBoss Rules can also tinker with the BRMS interface (GWT==Java in the browser), the odds are better that the BRMS will evolve apace with the core system.

Compare this with a framework like Echo2/3 where there is only a small cadre of developers who develop the JavaScript piece of what is essentially a Java centric framework, and consequently the development has lagged relative to other frameworks. So, good decision for JBoss Rules and probably a good decision if you are adding a web interface to your own Java system.

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Comments: 2 so far

  1. If you think version 4 is good , version 5 of the BRMS (renamed to Guvnor) is even better - the existing features are more powerful, and you gain scenario based testing to ensure that rules do what you think they should do.

    I was sceptical of Google Web Toolkit (GWT) before the JBoss Rules guys picked it up - partly because it is so radically different from other Java-Web Frameworks. But if you try out the BRMS you’ll see how powerful it can be (and how well GWT integrates with an SOA type backend).

    One small point: GWT does *not* use Java in the browser - it’ compiles the Java to HTML and Javascript. I’ve a little bit more on this (and other alternative frameworks) at the blogpost below:
    http://www.firstpartners.net/blog/technology/java-server-faces-jsf/2008/03/13/web2-with-javastruts2-spring-mvc-flex-javafx-and-google-web-toolkit/

    Comment by Paul Browne - FirstPartners Blog, Friday, June 20, 2008 @ 2:20 am

  2. @Paul

    Yes, you are right, GWT is a compiler that turns Java (and a subset of the JRE) into JavaScript. You can visit our extensive GWT tag section to find out more.

    Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 20, 2008 @ 2:15 pm

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