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So, what is Drools?

The techie answer guaranteed to get that glazed over look from anyone hounding you for details on project design is that Drools, part of the JBoss Enterprise BRMS product since federating in 2005, is a Business Rule Management System (BRMS) and rules engine written in Java which implements and extends the Rete pattern-matching algorithm within a rules engine capable of both forward and backward chaining inference.

Now, how about an answer fit for someone new to rules engines? After all, you’re here to learn the basics, right? Drools is a collection of tools which allow us to separate and reason over logic and data found within business processes. Ok, but what does that mean? Digging deeper, the keywords in that statement we need to consider are “logic” and “data”.

Logic, or rules in our case, are pieces of knowledge often expressed as, “When some conditions occur, then do some tasks”. Simple enough, no? These pieces of knowledge could be about any process in your organization, such as how you go about approving TPS reports, calculate interest on a loan, or how you divide workload among employees. While these processes sound complex, in reality, they’re made up of a collection of simple business rules. Let’s consider a daily ritual process for many workers: the morning coffee. The whole process is second nature to coffee drinkers. As they prepare for their work day, they probably don’t consider the steps involved—they simply react to situations at hand. However, we can capture the process as a series of simple rules:

  • When your mug is dirty, then go clean it
  • When your mug is clean, then go check for coffee
  • When the pot is full, then pour yourself a cup and return to your desk
  • When the pot is empty, then mumble about co-workers and make some coffee

Alright, so that’s logic, but what’s data? Facts (our word for data) are the objects that drive the decision process for us. Given the rules from our coffee example, some facts used to drive our decisions would be the mug and the coffee pot. While we know from reading our rules what to do when the mug or pot are in a particular state, we need facts that reflect an actual state on a particular day to reason over.

In seeing how a BRMS allows us to define the business rules of a business process, we can now state some of the features of a rules engine. As stated before, we’ve separated logic from data—always a good thing! In our example, notice how we didn’t see any detail about how to clean our mug or how to make a new batch of coffee, meaning we’ve also separated what to do from how to do it , thus allowing us to change procedure without altering logic. Lastly, by gathering all of our rules in one place, we’ve centralized our business process knowledge. This gives us an excellent facility when we need to explain a business process or transfer knowledge. It also helps to prevent tribal knowledge, or the ownership and understanding of an undocumented procedure by just one or a few users.

So when is a BRMS the right choice?

  • Consider a rules engine when a problem is too complex for traditional coding approaches. Rules can abstract away the complexity and prevent usage of fragile implementations.
  • Rules engines are also beneficial when a problem isn’t fully known. More often than not, you’ll find yourself iterating business methodology in order to fully understand small details involved that are second nature to users.
  • Rules are flexible and allow us to easily change what we know about a procedure to accommodate this iterative design. This same flexibility comes in handy if you find that your logic changes often over time.
  • Lastly, in providing a straightforward approach in documenting business rules, rules engines are an excellent choice if you find domain knowledge readily available, but via non-technical people who may be incapable of contributing to code.

Sounds great, so let’s get started, right? Well, I promised I’d also help you decide when a rules engine is not the right choice for you. In using a rules engine, someone must translate processes into actual rules, which can be a blessing in taking business logic away from developers, but also a curse in required training. Secondly, if your logic doesn’t change very often, then rules might be overkill. Likewise, If your project is small in nature and likely to be used once and forgotten, then rules probably aren’t for you. However, beware of the small system that will grow in complexity going forward!

So if rules are right for you, why should you choose Drools? First and foremost, Drools has the flexibility of an open source license with the support of JBoss available. Drools also boasts five modules (to be discussed in more detail later), making their system quite extensible with domain-specific languages, graphical editing tools, web-based tools, and more. If you’re partial to Eclipse, you’ll also likely come to appreciate their plugin. Still not convinced? Read on and give it a shot—after all, that’s why you’re here, right?

Installation

In just five easy steps, you can integrate Drools into a new or existing project.

Step 1 – what do I need?

For starters, you will need to check that you have all of the required elements, listed as follows (all versions are as of time of writing):

  • Java 1.5 (or higher) SE JDK.
  • Apache Maven 3.0.4.
  • Eclipse 4.2 (Juno) and the Drools plugin.
  • Memory—512 MB (minimum), 1 GB or higher recommended. This will depend largely on the scale of your JVM and rule sessions, but the more the better!

Step 2 – installing Java

Java is the core language on which Drools is built, and is the language in which we’ll be writing, so we’ll definitely be needing that. The easiest way to get Java going is to download from and follow the installation instructions found at:

www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

Step 3 – installing Maven

Maven is a build automation tool from Apache that lets us describe a configuration of the project we’re building and leave dependency management (amongst other things) up to it to work out. Again, the easiest way to get Maven up and running is to download and follow the documentation provided with the tool, found at:

maven.apache.org/download.cgi

Step 4 – installing Eclipse

If you happen to have some other IDE of choice, or maybe you’re just the old school type, then it’s perfectly acceptable to author and execute your Drools-integrated code in your usual fashion. However, if you’re an Eclipse fan, or you’d like to take advantage of auto-complete, syntax highlighting, and debugging features, then I recommend you go ahead and install Eclipse and the Drools plugin.

The version of Eclipse that we’re after is Eclipse IDE for Java Developers, which you can download and find installation instructions for on their site:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Step 5 – installing the Drools Eclipse plugin

In order to add the IDE plugin to Eclipse, the easiest method is to use Eclipse’s built-in update manager. First, you’ll need to add something the plugin depends on—the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF).

In the Eclipse menu, click on Help, then on Install New Software…, enter the following URL in the Work with: field, and hit Add.

download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/updates/releases/

Give your repository a nifty name in the pop-up window, such as GEF, and continue on with the install as prompted. You’ll be asked to verify what you’re installing and accept the license.

Now we can add the Drools plugin itself—you can find the URL you’ll need by visiting:

http://www.jboss.org/drools/downloads.html

Then, search for the text Eclipse update site and you’ll see the link you need. Copy the address of the link to your clipboard, head back into Eclipse, and follow the same process you did for installing GEF. Note that you’ll be asked to confirm the install of unsigned content, and that this is expected.

Summary

By this point, you know what Drools is, you should also be ready to integrate Drools into your applications. If you find yourself stuck, one of the good parts about an open source community is that there’s nearly always someone who has faced your problem before and likely has a solution to recommend.

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