Eric D. Schabell: A JBoss BRMS workshop report

Friday, July 31, 2009

A JBoss BRMS workshop report

 The last week I have spent in Atlanta, GA at the RedHat offices attending a JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) workshop. This was intended to give us a deeper understanding of the lastest rules platform offering that RedHat put together and was intended for a very technical audience.

I wanted to provide a bit of insight into the workshop to give you an idea what you can expect to receive if you should contemplate looking deeper into the JBoss BRMS.

Before I dig into the details and provide my impressions, I wanted to include some side notes on a trip to the USA. As you can see, the breakfast can just be awesome. I love pancakes/biscuits&gravy!

It would also not be America if you did not include something about the cars (picture is of a 1930's hotrod) and a baseball game (picture in Mariners stadium).

The workshop was held in the RedHat JBoss offices and included participants from the all over the globe; Japan, China, India, Argentina, France, Netherlands, and USA . The location was great, the instructors very good, and the kitchen was well stocked with coffee, soda, and snacks (see pictures). It was a three day show covering the following topics:

Day 1:
  • Introduction to JBoss BRMS
  • Rules development process
  • The Drools rule language
  • JBoss DevelStudio - Drools IDE
  • RETE

This day started with a look at rule engines in general and what the BRMS actually includes. It demonstrated these components in action with a demo. The look at a rules development process provided a framework for making your rules projects successful. Covering the Drools rule language took us through the basics, conditions, consequences, and a closer look at the API for those programming interactions with the BRMS. We installed the JBoss DevelStudio, tooling (free if you use the JBoss DevelStudio), and looked at the various components there including the debugging facilities. The day finished with a closer look at how the rule engine really works. Forward chaining and the RETE network was discussed in great detail as we were technical geeks wanting to know exactly how it all worked of course. There were labs for all these topics, allowing us to dig into the details on our own laptops.

Day 2:
  • Decision tables
  • Business Rules Manager: administration and guided rule editor
  • Business Rules Manager: QA and deployment
  • JBDS BMR integration
  • Domain specific languages
Today started with a look at decision tables, as used by a business person to manage their rule base. We imported them and took a closer look at manipulating them through the API. The next topic was the Business Rules Manager (BRM) which is the product branded from the community web interface project better know as Guvnor. We looked at administration, assets, packages, rules, QA, and testing using this interface. My personal opinion is that the testing facilities are one of the stronger points to using this product. Next topic was the integration of the development environment with the BRM interface. We looked at creating a rules repository, exploring it and then adding assets from the developers IDE to be then manipulated/used in the BRM interface. Very good stuff! The day closed out with a detailed look at Domain specific languages (DSL). What a mapping file is, rule files using a DSL, the programming API when using a DSL, and using the DSL in the BRM interface. Again, there were labs for all these topics, allowing us to dig into the details on our own laptops. On a side note, Burr Sutter (Product Manager) joined us for most of the workshop (see picture) to add comments about product direction and jumped in on any questions we might have had with regards to the various products.

Day 3:
  • Advanced rule authoring
  • Execution control
  • Rule flow
  • Complex event processing (CEP)
  • Performance considerations
The final day started by digging into advanced rule authoring concepts like conditional elements, field constraints, nested accessors, property change listeners, and the dynamic rules API. We discussed execution control topics including salience, control facts, groups, duration, no loop, and truth maintenance. We took a closer look into the rules flow and how you can create one, add constraints, deploy it, and run it. This was a lot of fun for me personally as I come from a jBPM background and know that product very well. After lunch we discussed the more advanced topic of Complex event processing (CEP). This included event declaration, semantics, streams support, event cloud, session clock, temporal reasoning, sliding window support, rule based partitioning, and memory management. Performance considerations was a topic that represented the best practices of using the Jboss BRMS. What are the various ways to prevent larger projects from performing poorly due to bad practices or bad rule writing. Again, there were labs for all these topics, allowing us to dig into the details on our own laptops (see picture).

I will be taking this all back to the Europe region and hopefully will be spreading the word soon at a location near you! 

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