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What Vendors Promise | Caveats | Weighting |
---|---|---|
Lower application maintenance costs | IT personnel have yet another set of software and additional servers to learn, install, and maintain. Developers have to learn a new way (such as learning the ILOG Eclipse-based IDE Rule Studio). Changing existing source code to use business rules is much like brain surgery -- taking the thinking parts of the code outside the body (of code). With business rules separated from other processing, developers may feel that their job has been downgraded. | |
Improve collaboration between IT and business departments.
Making a scenario manager application
available to business workers enable them to
specify rules lets them skip software requirements.
GUI that translate Excel spreadsheets or natural language text into programming code make business rules more visible, understandable, and available to those who need to manipulate them. | Use of business rules is a hugh paradigm change for IT. A big change in mindset is needed to understand its full potential. It's not just an API change that developers adopt like switching from an Oracle to a DB2 database. It's not just that Use cases need to be written differently to account for dynamic changes to workflow due to dynamic rules.
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More accurate and consistent policy implementation across applications. Becauase those who make the rules change the rules, there is less misunderstanding. |
As ponderous as they can be, the process of going through requirements specifications and analysis
forces the collaboration necessary to think through
subtle but major side-effects from even small changes to business logic --
wisdom usually learned the hard and expensive way (suffering the consequences of mistakes).
This is why being good at Business Rules Language | |
More responsiveness and flexibility from separating business logic from source code. Business logic that is systematized separately in a rules application is faster and safer to change than hard-coded logic within application source code, which takes time and introduces risks. | Rules that are dynamically changed by a system require monitoring and tuning by people that need to be smarter and more educated than before, lest the rules become an unruly "Frankenstein monster" crazy robot. Transplanting rules away from developers may make it more difficult for developers to debug and testers to find logic flaws. Application responsiveness (user response time) degrades when another layer of processing and traffic is added within application servers. Another set of servers can become another potential bottleneck to throughput. So performance testing and monitoring will be a key part of BRE implementations. | |
Not brought up by salespeople and sales brochures | Transferrability of business rules is a concern because the industry is still fragmented. As of this writing, the Business Rules Group drafted the Java-based "industry-wide standard" Sun JSR 94 rule engine language API based on CLIPS. But even the JSR 94 reference implementation (JESS, Java Expert System Shell) language is proprietary (developed in Java by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California). Hopefully, sure-to-come consolidation among companies in this space would result in synergy (products combining to become better than separate parts) rather than burying of good ideas (like automakers buying up commuter rail lines so they can plow their rails under). |
It would be helpful if each of these items can be associated with a common factor of dollars.
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VM | Vendor Product | Pricing | Input | Algorithm | Stds | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Java | IBM ILOG JRules | Comm. | JSR 94 in Eclipse Rule Studio | - | - | Its ILOG CPLEX and CP Optimizer are constraint solvers that find optimal configurations and routes. This French-based co. was acquired by IBM July 2008. 125 question Application Development cert. exam 000-527 for 6.x, 000-528 for Advanced, 000-529 for 7.x |
.NET | IBM ILOG .NET | Comm. | JSR 94 in Eclipse Rule Studio | - | - | - |
-- | Haley | Comm. | JSR 94 | - | - | Defined the vendor neutral RML (Rules Markup Language) for JSR 94 |
-- | Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor (from the same company that brought you the FICO score which lenders over-depended on -- leading to the 2008 financial crisis) | Comm | Proprietary GUI, JSR 94 | Optimized Rete | - | Claims superior performance from the creator of older Rete used by other vendors. Its rules compiler and forward-chaining considers more complex rule dependencies faster. FIC's Decision Simulator add-on evaluates the profitability of different rule sets. |
Java | Red Hat JBoss Rules | GPL | Rete-OO | - | - | - |
Ruby | rools.rubyforge | BSD | - | - | - | A Ruby BPMS Solution integrating Rails, XForms, OpenWFEru, and pure ruby rails inference engine that supports decision tables, XML rules, and Ruby Rules. |
Java | Visual Rules | GNU/LGPL | Not Rete | - | - | Plug-in for Eclipse, SAP NetWeaver or IBM Rational. |
.NET | SDSRE | GNU/LGPL | - | - | - | - |
.NET | InRule | GNU/LGPL | - | - | - | Claims to be the most popular for .NET due to its MS BizTalk server plug-in |
.NET | NxBRE | GNU/LGPL | - | - | - | - |
.NET | Drools | GNU/LGPL | JSR 94 | - | - | Lead by Mark Proctor from London, canadian Edson Terelli, and Australian Mic Neale. |
Java | Pega Systems | Comm | Visio | - | - | Generates from Visio drawings rules for processing on a Java server. It's popular as a complete BPM workflow app GUI development platform rather than just a BRMS service/plug-in. |
_ | Coricon | Comm. | Spreadsheet in the Eclipse-based Rule Studio or ARIS Rule Designer GUI from IDS Scheer. | DETI | - | Its BRMS is built into Tibco's Staffware Rules Manager. Its DETI (Design-Time Inferencing, pronounced Dee-Tee) engine which is fast at run-time because it does most of the complex checking of the rulebase during design time. This removes the problems later on that can be caused by circular reasoning, duplicate rules, inconsistent rules, and incompleteness of the ruleset. Designed by Dr. Mark Allen. |
_ | OpenRules | open | spreadsheets & Eclipse | - | - | A full-scale open source BRMS based on MS Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and Eclipse IDE for quick and intuitive GUI generation. Its tutorials and examples from CTO Jacob Feldman, Eugene Freuder, etc. are free and open as well. Its strength is its integration of Business Rules with Optimization and Machine Learning to extract patterns and decision rules from data for true business agility (constant learning instead of waiting for human experts to define rules). |
Java | OpenLexicon | Open | - | - | - | Provides a rules repository with a simple web-based wizard published from simple Java web service API's that integrates rule sets with no code, so its scalable. |
Java | CA | Comm | - | - | - | - |
Java | SAP Yasu | Comm | - | - | - | - |
RuleXpress and RuleTrack from Business Rule Solutions, LLC (London, UK)
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