I gave a presentation tonight on JBoss Rules to the Phoenix JUG. There was a good group of people there, and we had a very lively discussion around some of the strengths and weaknesses of rules engines in general. It was fun to cover a topic that I don’t hear much of (outside of sales pitches), and to see so much interest. There were a log of thoughtful questions, and many people were interested in ideas of how to program using rules.
At work, we use JBoss Rules for a small portion of our code but that code handles an awful lot of our transactional complexity. Spring, Hibernate, and Struts handle most of the heavy lifting of our structure. But JBoss Rules helps keep our routing logic and call script questions fairly clean and maintainable.
While a lot of the value of a presentation is in the verbal exchange that goes on in the room, I figure there’s something to be gained by gazing through the slides and sample code after the fact. With any luck, I’ll take some time in the next couple weeks to put up some podcasts (gasp!) on JBoss Rules. Enjoy.
Presentation: rules.pdf
Source Code: jboss-rules
May 11th, 2007 at 18:15
Tim,
It’s great that people are getting out there and spreading the JBoss Rules word, keep up the good work
I have highlighted your presentation in my blog, http://markproctor.blogspot.com/2007/05/phoenix-jug-jboss-rules-apollo-group.html, hope thats ok? Have you checked out the new stuff in 4.0 Milestone Release 2? Lots of declarative goodness in there 
I’d also be interested to know if 4.0 enables you to run more scenarios a second, or whether the limiting factors are else where.
Mark
http://markproctor.com/
May 14th, 2007 at 01:22
[...] you can’t wait for that, Mark Proctor’s blog has a lot of useful rules information, and Tim Shadel has the pdf of a presentation that he gave in Phoenix Arizon on his [...]
May 15th, 2007 at 20:52
A podcast on it would be great. We used to use one of the big Enterprise rules engine and it was almost impossible to unit test. Not so bad to write really involved integration tests, but unit testing was nigh impossible.
One of our developers took a hard look at Drools and it looked a lot better than our Enterprise option, and easy to actually unit test. So again, a podcast would be great.
June 1st, 2007 at 17:42
with rules you tend to do “scenario” testing, that basically involves chucking a load of data at rules and checking the outcome. Someone in the community has started work on one, and an eclipse plugin, but he’s struggling and needs more help from others in the community.