Drools

Abstract

The Drools project is an open-source Java project at JBoss about business rules, business processes and event processing. This presentation will give you an overview of a few of the most important modules that are currently part of the Drools project.

Drools Expert is the rule engine. It extracts complex decision logic from your application, such as price/discount calculations, insurance approvals and health care decisions. By defining that decision logic as business rules, it becomes easier read, change and support and actually faster to execute.

Drools Planner optimizes automated planning, such as employee shift rostering, course scheduling, bin packaging and vehicle routing. It builds a better planning solution than human planners, by using less resources and pleasing employees and customers more.

Drools Flow is the workflow engine. It provides business process capabilities, where you use high-level flow charts to describe the sequence in which certain tasks in your application should be executed, like for example order processing, human workflows, etc. It allows you to model, execute and manage the business processes of your application more easily.

Drools Fusion does complex event processing (CEP), where (possibly high-volume) event streams can be processed at runtime, like for example real-time monitoring. It helps identifying the meaningful events, by detection of patterns, relationships between events, etc.

The Drools project offers you one integrated and unified environment where you can combine all these paradigms, including web-based (Drools Guvnor) and Eclipse-based tooling.

Speakers

Kris Verlaenen is one of the Drools core developers. He started out in 2006 by voluntarily contributing Eclipse plugins to the Drools project, which were desperately needed at that point. After finishing his PhD in Computer Science in 2008, he joined JBoss full-time and became the Drools Flow lead, where he continues his research on rule and process integration. He also has a keen interest in the health-care domain, one of the areas that have already shown to have a great need for a unified process, rule and event processing framework.

Geoffrey De Smet is a Drools community developer and has been working on Drools Planner in his spare time since 2006. With an early Drools Planner implementation, he finished 4th in the international timetabling competition 2007. He is also involved in several other open source projects. In his main job at Schaubroeck N.V. he builds applications with JPA, Hibernate, Spring and other Java technologies.