JBoss Rules Documentation and Usage/Design Patterns

[mark.proctor]

Sam, from the JBoss Documentation team ([e-mail]), is about to start working on the JBoss Rules Documentation. Initially he is just working on spelling and grammar, then he'll work on trying to make the existing content flow better as well as filling out missing content. Eventually I hope, with the community's help, he'll start to add new content. In the mean time please email him, or this mailing list with areas you think need improvements and suggestions for further documentation - please try and elaborate on your ideas to make them useful, as "more use cases" or "usage/design patterns" is too generic a request. But requests like "what pattern can I use to find min/max values" or suggestions like "I think the busy bee/9 queens/travelling salesman/etc problem would make good documentation" are valid.

The Rule Engine industry is in a very immature state for technical pattern usage; all the focus to date has been on the business methodology or knowledge engineering side, I guess that is how they justify their big prices. I've made an initial wiki page that I hope we can pad out with generic technical usage/design patterns for rules- please help build this up into something useful. Sam will then work on turning this into documentation for the manual. My aim is to make our documentation the best out there. This should not be hard when you look at the rubbish most vendors put out there in order that people are more reliant on their expensive training courses - the PeopleSoft/SAP way of prodiving "Enterprise Solutions". Remember the wiki is a public resource open to all, you just need a jboss.com login.
http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=UsagePatterns


Mark
JBoss Rules Project Lead

[ameya_bhakay]

It's really nice of you Sam! Well, I would also suggest the documentation to be in PDF or DOC format. I find it convenient to usually print the documentation and go through it. Also, how much would you take to finish up the entire documentation?

[mark.proctor]

Ameya,

Docbook can output to PDF and the JBoss Rules build system is able to do this. However currently its disabled due to docbook to pdf rendering problems when images cannot be rendered onto a single page. It needs someone to go all over the documentation playing with image sizes until it is able to render without crashing.

[ameya_bhakay]

Hey Mark,

By when do you guys plan to release the updated/ new documentation??

[phanigandeed]

Document detaililng patterns of usage (for example before iniating actual condition check, app wants rule engine to retrieve elements matching the criteria", and then apply condition check on those objects) etc with examples would be useful.

In current set of documents I find on Jboss site, it is not listed in appropriate form. For example, currently my engineer is trying to do this:

Asserts set of event objects and managed objects into rules and then asks rule engine to use rules file (invokeRules) which has condition check on
events and managed objects.

To do this, he has to first retrieve managed objects which match specific criteria, and then apply "condition" and action rule on those events and matched managed objects. It is not clearly documented anywhere as how to do this, (some kind of "preprocessing" before actual "condition" is evaluated.

If any of you used CLIPS, you know what I am talking of.