Abstract:

If you want to store information, you use a database. If you want to distribute information you use a web server. If you want to capture Business logic, you should be using a Business Rules engine.

Mark Proctor is project lead of the most widely used Open Rules Engine,  JBoss Drools. He demonstrates how to integrate the rules engine in your Enterprise Java application, showing the advantages for performance, scalability and clarity of requirements. Just enough Rete 2 and Rule engine internals are covered to ground these claims in reality. As a practical example, Mark shows how business users in a (fortunately fictional) insurance company can write their rules (in near English) using the Web Based Business Rules Management System (BRMS). These are then  hot-deployed into a scalable application running on a choice of web and application servers.

Presenter: Mark Proctor

Mark Proctor received his B.Eng. in Engineer Science and Technology and then his M.Sc. in Business and Information Systems; both from Brunel University, West London. His M.Sc. thesis was in the field of Genetic Algorithms; which is where he first got his interest for anything AI related. Mark then did a number of boring jobs before getting involved in Drools. Bob McWhirter (then Codehaus and now JBoss too) hooked him in, during the earlier stages, and managed to persuade him to include it in a production system. Mark then realised how buggy and incomplete it was and effectively abandoned by Bob; rather than face the wrath of his boses for pushing dodgy OSS on them, Mark took it  on himself to develop Drools where he then become the project lead and the rest is history.

Slides: jboss_rules.pdf

Home: IJTC Agenda