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javaenterpriserule-enginebusiness-rules

Criteria to Evaluate Business Rules Engines

We are shopping for Business Rules Engines. We want to make our core application customizable to different customers with slightly different requirements. The people who would actually do the customizations are analysts. I.e. non-programmers who are technically skilled (usually have a degree in sciences).

What are the criteria to evaluate business rules engines? Are there open source and comercial ones? What are your experiences in ease of use, documentation, support, price, etc.

Our app is in Java.

Solution

  • Drools (used to be Drools then JBoss Rules then Drools again) is a very good open-source rules engine and definitely worth a look.

    To my mind the best criteria to evaluate a rules engine are:

    • Is it configurable (otherwise you'd just code it instead)
    • Is it performant.
    • How easy is it for non technical people to change rules
    • How easy is it for new rule sets to be deployed (and old ones undeployed).

    Several Rules Engines have Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) and Drools is no exception. This makes deployment much easier for non-techies.

    There is good support for Drools via docs and tutorials on the web and even via the IRC channel.

    I've also used the Rules Engine that comes with IBM Websphere Process Server and found that to be quite good as well (although pricey).