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Drools

Score7 out of 10

7 Reviews and Ratings

What is Drools?

Drools, developed by Red Hat, is a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) designed to streamline and automate decision-making processes. According to the vendor, Drools caters to a wide range of professionals including business analysts, software developers, and data scientists, and finds application in various industries such as the financial services and healthcare sectors.

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Categories & Use Cases

Product Demos

Who Buys & Uses Drools

Drools to rule over the rules

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Drools is used to manage business logic and to make it easy to understand and maintain. Drools helps you manage logic without complete knowledge of code. You concentrate on business logic only. It is very efficient when it comes to rules evolution when logic evolves with new business problems or capacities.

Pros

  • Writing rules with business focus
  • Rules evolution and maintenance
  • separate business logic from program code

Cons

  • Error handling may be difficult
  • Accurate for big projects, for small projects it may be too much effort

Most Important Features

  • Versioning
  • Ui to make evolution easy

Return on Investment

  • Separation between code and rules make it easy to evolve with business agenda
  • Error handling was sometimes tricky and required expertise

Other Software Used

Ionic, Angular Feature Flags, Google App Engine

Drools - Dealing with evolving complexity

Pros

  • We started using the Drools since its early open source version, now Drools has grown to one application suite. We are majorly using the rule engine core Expert. It is very well integrated with our corporate programming language standard - java.
  • We also use Fusion to write rules about events that occur over time, which enhance our capability of dealing with static data and dynamic events for some complex business environment. Also, we like the fact that Fusion fully implements all first-order logic operators, which helps us deal with CEP very well.
  • The new editor UI Guvnor has been improved a lot and the optimization module Solver does a good job to "compile" complex rule flows to gain more performance.

Cons

  • Fusion doesn't support persistence of working memory, which brings some extra high availability risk to our business.
  • Guvnor still has a lot room to be implemented, it is not so user-friendly for non-technical people, so a lot of business users complain it is hard to master.
  • Rule execution server doesn't even have JMX implemented, hard to be monitored.
  • Drools is still lacking support for key Web services standards.

Return on Investment

  • The IT department quickly adopted Drools as it is a very good java-based rule engine, which saves a lot of time to meet the project timeline and balanced our business requirements.
  • Recently we start considering the OpenRules, which may be more business user-friendly.

Other Software Used

IntelliJ WebStorm