JBoss Rules implementation

JBoss Rules (also known as Drools), part of the JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System is a powerful business rules platform built around a sophisticated rules engine. This platform can enable IT projects to reach a new level of sophistication in their ability to manage the business logic embedded in software applications, making it possible to develop, test and maintain the software more effectively and lower cost.

As with other modern application frameworks, such as Seam, organisations who introduce this technology discover that these benefits come at the cost of a paradigm shift in software design that results in a steep learning curve for the development team, and increased project risk.

JBoss Rules implementation projects and consultancy

In 2011, Lunatech provided remote consultancy to help a development team at a transport services company in the US migrate from ILOG JRules to JBoss Rules. Lunatech’s solution architect helped the team learn to write rules and resolve performance issues.

In 2011, a US advertising product company hired Lunatech to provide a JBoss Rules expert as the link between the American commercial team, the Russian development team and their UK customer. Lunatech provided remote consultancy, then participated in a three-day on-site workshop to explain JBoss Rules to business users, provide recommendations for managing large numbers of rules, and lead sessions on rule analysis and brainstorming future implementation opportunities.

In 2010, Lunatech represented Red Hat on-site in Northern France, where Lunatech’s solution architect spent a week implementing a Drools proof-of-concept for a new Red Hat customer in the insurance industry. Lunatech demonstrated how Drools relates to their business problem and implemented an application prototype that demonstrated the Business Rules Management System’s key features using end-customer’s domain model and IT infrastructure.

In 2009, a Dutch Internet services company hired Lunatech to design a JBoss Rules architecture to replace a high-cost legacy system implemented using Peoplesoft Configurator. Lunatech provided a JBoss Rules expert who guided the technical design and implementation in order to use JBoss Rules appropriately and to avoid common beginners' mistakes.

In 2008, Lunatech used Drools to implement rules in Lunatech's VisibleLogistics product for the US Department of Defense. For the implementation, Lunatech translated functional criteria into rule definitions and designed the integration with the JBoss Seam web application. This provided the application with rule-based event processing logic to enable the application to respond to supply chain events of interest.

Also in 2008, Lunatech used Drools to implement a CMS for the Dutch government to officially publish laws and regulations electronically. A rule-based system inspects document metadata and determines document work-flow, in an architecture that integrates JBoss Rules and JBoss jBPM.

Lunatech’s offering

Lunatech Research can provide JBoss Rules experts to advise or complement an existing development team, in order to reduce project risk. Our experts can guide a development team through the paradigm shift required to get the benefit of a very different approach to implementing business software. Lunatech can also use its technical project management experience to staff and manage its own development team, to deliver a complete JBoss Rules implementation.

See also: JBoss Rules articles by Lunatech Research staff.

Lunatech Research - IT consulting, product research and software development