Eric D. Schabell: JBoss Drools Business Rules review

Sunday, February 28, 2010

JBoss Drools Business Rules review

I read this book early in 2009 when I was diving deeper into the JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) and found it to be a good overview.

It is light on the technical depth, but this is not a problem and all crucial parts of the system are covered. It appeals to both business types and technical types trying to get a grasp of the Drools project components.

The book begins with a good introduction to rules and business rules in an organization, provides help with setting up your Drools environment and provides a tour of the following components in your business rules infrastructure:
  • Guvnor, the guided rule editor
  • JBoss IDE, the developers rule editing environment
  • Testing your rules
  • Managing your rules from Excel
  • Domain Specific Languages (DSL)
  • RuleFlow, graphical rule design
Furthermore, the book takes you through deploying rules in a real life situation and details how the rule engine works all the way down to the RETE algorithm.

This book is a very good place to start your JBoss Business Rules experience, whether you have done rules development before or not. It will get you up to speed on rules, is easy to read, well structured and before you know it you will be designing your first rules package.