Michal Bali - Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developers Guide

Michal Bali , freelance software developer, has more than 8 years of experience working with Drools and has an extensive knowledge of Java, JEE. He designed and implemented several systems for a major dental insurance company. He is an active member of the Drools community and can be contacted at <>.

I'd like to thank Drools lead Mark Proctor and his team that consists of Edson Tirelli, Mario Fusco, Kris Verlaenen, and other contributors for giving me something to write about. They were of great help while I was writing the book.

I'd also like to thank all the reviewers and the whole editorial team for their patience and help while I was writing this book and in particular, Sarah Cullington, Suchi Singhal, Anish Ramchandani, Joanna Finchen, Mario Fusco, and other anonymous reviewers.

Finally, I thank my wife Michala for supporting me and putting up with me while I wrote.

Alaa Abed is a die-hard open source philosophy advocate. In 1995, after having his Masters degree in automation, he started his career in software engineering. His early projects involved writing assembly language and C/C++ device drivers, TCP/IP stack implementation, and Unix terminal emulation tools.

His passion with Java started in 1998 when he designed and implemented a content management system for mobile content syndication. Since then, he has been working with a diverse set of clients across various industries such as financial, energy, health, and many ISVs.

For the past several years he enjoyed designing Java frameworks for ORM, MVC-based presentation, analytics and reporting and enabling rapid development for rich web applications.

He currently is a Senior Architect working on enterprise integration, multichannel delivery, and business intelligence solutions.

I'd like to thank Sara and Nadia for making my life worth living.

Mario Fusco is a senior software engineer at Red Hat working at the development of the core of Drools, the JBoss rule engine. He has huge experience as a Java developer, having been involved in (and often leading) many enterprise-level projects in several industries ranging from media companies to the financial sector. Among his interests, there are also functional programming and domain-specific languages. By leveraging these two passions, he also created the open source library lambdaj with the purposes of providing an internal Java DSL for manipulating collections and allowing a bit of functional programming in Java.

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Preface

Business rules and processes can help your business by providing a level of agility and flexibility. As a developer, you will be largely responsible for implementing these business rules and processes effectively, but implementing them systematically can often be difficult due to their complexity. Drools makes the process of implementing these rules and processes quicker and handles the complexity, making your life a lot easier!

This book guides you through various features of Drools, such as rules, processes, decision tables, complex event processing, Drools Rete implementation with various optimizations, and others. It will help you to set up the Drools platform and start creating your own business. It's easy to start developing with Drools if you follow our real-world examples that are intended to make your life easier.

Starting with an introduction to the basic syntax that is essential for writing rules, the book will guide you through validation and human-readable rules that define, maintain, and support your business agility. As a developer, you will be expected to represent policies, procedures, and constraints regarding how an enterprise conducts its business; this book makes it easier by showing you the ways in which it can be done.

A real-life example of a banking domain allows you to see how the internal workings of the rules engine operate. A loan approval process example shows the support of processes within Drools. Parts of a banking fraud detection system are implemented with the Drools Fusion module, which is the complex event processing part of Drools. This, in turn, will help developers to work on preventing fraudulent users from accessing systems in an illegal way.