JBoss Drools Business Rules book release

A new book was released this week on business rules called JBoss Drools Business Rules published by Packt. JBoss Drools Business Rules is a informational book intended for JBoss Drools implmentation and practice. The idea of the book is to help implement JBoss Drools to develop easy to understand business rules applications within a Business Rules Management System.

For those new to JBoss Drools, Drools is an open source business rules management system that is free to download, use, embed and distribute. From the Drools website...

Drools is a business rule management system (BRMS) and an enhanced Rules Engine implementation, ReteOO, based on Charles Forgy's Rete algorithm tailored for the JVM. More importantly, Drools provides for Declarative Programming and is flexible enough to match the semantics of your problem domain with Domain Specific Languages, graphical editing tools, web based tools and developer productivity tools.

Introduction to business rules

Since I am learning more about business rules I thought I would share some resources from around the internet. There is definitely a lot of information on the subject. It does take some effort to sift between the advertising and the good content.

IBM developerWorks has a great article by Arun Chhatpar on an Introduction to Business Rules. Incidentatly IBM developerWorks has a great wealth of information on Open Source software. Additionally here is the Wikipedia entry on Business Rules. The Business Rules Group, a non-commercial IT peer group, has some good examples of Business Rules.

Please share other sources of Rules Engines and Business Rules.

Open source Business Rules Management Systems and Rules Engines

I've seen much talk on the internet about advancement of Rules Engines and Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). As you can imagine there are Open Source options for Rules Engines and business rules systems. It seems the top players in Rules Engines are written mostly in the Java programming language which fairly recently was made Open Source by Sun Microsystems. Yet with Open Source software the possibilties could be endless with the tools used to develop Rules Engines.

Some of the top Open Source players in the Rules Engine business include:

Drools

OpenRules

JRulesEngine

The interesting thing about Rules Engines and Business Rules Management Systems is they most invariably use a rules repository. This repository could be setup on a client/server network which is very easy to setup with the Open Source Linux operating system.

For another resource, Business Review Online's Open Source Blog had a review last year of the Top 10 Best Open Source Rules Engines.

Now I have to admit that I am fairly new to BRMS and Rules Engines. I tend to deal more with the modelling and decision support systems of the Rules Engines. I would love to learn more about this area.