Mark Proctor and the Drools team have released the first JBoss Rules product last week. This adds an important building block to JEMS, the Open Source Platform for SOA, enabling a more modular and easily modified application and business process architecture. JBoss Rules will allow business process and application developers to separate evolving business policies and rules from slower changing business logic and process logic. As business policies and rules change, applications and SOA deployments become easier to maintain, enhance and modify by reducing or eliminating the need to rebuild and redeploy monolithic applications. Additionally, multiple applications and business process flows can share the same rules.

A simple example of a small set of rules is what does an airline offer its Platinum members when they purchase tickets online. Changing daily specials offered to different travel groups (e.g., Gold, Platinum) may involve such items as seat upgrades, discounts, partner special offerings (e.g. hotels or rental cars), and other add-on offerings (e.g., tour packages). The business logic required to code this in Java is quite significant and difficult to modify on a daily or weekly basis when these rules are embedded within Java business logic. Separating these rules out of an application or SOA deployment into JBoss Rules will enable IT to rapidly and affordably change their SOA and applications to meet daily business needs.

Scale this scenario up into more complex business processes and interelationships amongst a group of businesses and JBoss Rules really pays to utilize many times over!

Checkout the latest release of JBoss Rules and save yourself and organization a lot of time and money as you build up your business's rules repository.