I have been asked to start exploring a Activiti tool for some client demo.
The demo will also have JBoss Drools with which Activiti will be integrated.
I am new to both of these tools and business process world, so excuse me if the question is dumb.
The question is why do you need Drools? Isn't Activiti enough for the job?
Both of them have conditional elements so why do you need Activiti on top of drools?
This question doesn't quite fit the purpose of StackOverflow, so don't be surprised if you get a few flags. But I'll try to give a short answer.
Activity is a workflow engine, Drools is a business rules engine. They serve two different purposes.
Workflow engines are useful when you have a flow of actions of different actors that need to be controlled programmatically.
Rules engines are useful when you have business rules for executing some task automatically that you want to describe in a declarative way.
Both purposes are orthogonal to each other, meaning that the problem you have to solve may require none, just one, or both of them.
Imagine a workflow where a customer reports an incident, some experts have to work on it, and finally a bill gets produced, but no heavy algorithms are behind those tasks. That might be supported by a workflow engine without a rules engine.
Imagine a complex price model for a product, like cars having all sorts of special features that may be ordered. (Hifi speakers cost 400 €, except if the executive version of the car is ordered, where they only cost 200 € if ordered in combination with smartphone adapter...) Here a rules engine may be useful, although nobody talked about a workflow, so no workflow engine is needed.
Imagine the first example (incident workflow) together with a complex billing scheme. Here both tools may be used.
I wonder why these two types of tools are in some places described as perfectly fitting together. (Maybe this kind of claim motivated your question.) They serve two different purposes, and whether you need them both depends on the problem you have to solve.
I am working on a multi-client web-based application that analyses sensor data and shall invoke actions based on this data with a rule engine.
Every client of this application has a set of environmental sensors (10s - 100s) and a set of rules to be evaluated every time the sensor values change (the sensor values are copied into a database).
A basic set of rules will often be reused by different clients but the rules are individually parameterized (e.g. time dependant) for each client and every client has a different amount of sensors and rules, which can be configured individually. Some rules might even be specific to single clients.
I believe that drools might be a good choice for such an implementation - using drools guvnor to manage the rules for each client. Every client would have his own knowledge base and rule execution session.
I wonder if such an environment would scale and if there is a benchmark or real-world example where someone has used drools for such scenario.
Most benchmarks I could find assess different rule engines by their ability to perform rules on a growing number of facts. The amount of facts in my scenario would be relatively stable (per client) and scalability would rather be limited by the amount of clients and concurrent application of many knowledge bases and sessions.
Any comment about benchmarks or rule engine comparison regarding this scalability problem is welcome. I'd also be glad to hear about real-world implementations where every client has his own rules and dataset to work on.
The main problem with benchmarks is that they will vary a lot depending on the specific rules that you write for your own domain. Most of the benchmarks are tweaked to perform better in the rule engine that is testing. If you have a session per client and you have a stable number of client you will face no problem. Once you get the initial version of your project you can fine tune the engine to improve the performance.
The most "difficult" thing in my opinion is to get the infrastructure right, with that I mean, when to create the sessions and how to select the rules for each of the clients. Because that's part of your specific domain, you will need to code it and manage all the sessions.
Hope it helps
Acting on sensor data is one of the examples given for "Complex Event Processing". The following link may give a deeper insight on this subject.
Drools Fusion is also capable of CEP.
In my project I have some requirements I want to use Drools to fit. There are some rules that do not change often and serve as the foundation. Then there should be a second DSLR which changes more often and in which the already defined rules should be expanded, overriden and/or aggregated.
Is it possible to use drools for such requirements. I red the Drools documentation but I am not sure that this is possible.
I suspect you have made your plans by now, but for reference, here's something of an answer.
What you describe is a typical Drools application, so at a high level, 'yes' Drools can be used that way.
You can set up some initial DRL technical rules, which are very much for developers to maintain. The next step is how to support the business users. Drools provides:
DSL/DSRL - Developers write DSL templates, which map a natural language style of phrase to DRL. Business users write DSRL in that natural language syntax. In reality I tend to find that this is easy to read, but not so easy to write correctly. However, if you have Guvnor, the guided rules make use of the DSL to enable business users to build up rules easily. They can just pick and choose from drop-down lists to build rules using the DSL.
Spreadsheets - Here the developers create a spreadsheet with a number of hidden fields that map the cells to rules. Each row in the table becomes a rule. A business user just needs to fill in fields.
Web decision tables - In Guvnor, these are similar to spreadsheets in look, a developer can easily create a table which maps LHS constraints to actions, which could be modifying existing facts, or creating new ones. Again, business users can maintain these by adding rows to the tables and changing values in the cells. These are probably the least 'technical' from a business user's perspective, so I prefer them where possible.
If you use Guvnor, then the business users have a web site they go to where they can update rules and save them. Depending on how you want to work, the runtime rules engine can automatically pick up those changes, or you can implement a more strict release procedure for rules changes.
Greetings,
I am currently in search of a framework that could be used in the development of a system that will find the best option based on a series of responses provided by a user, in a closed survey format.
Our company offers several service plans, and the idea behind this system is that the user can respond to questions (text format), and these answers can be mapped to the service plan that best meets the customer's needs. Each service plan has several attributes, and these attributes change over time, so we are looking for a flexible solution.
Would a Business Rule Engine be an adequate framework for this type of problem?
thank you!
You could do this with a rules engine.
However, what you are actually building is a survey. There are lots of survey software that allows for the definition of conditionaly logic and branching within the survey.
It would probably be cheaper and faster for you to use survey software.
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I have a pretty decent list of the advantages of using a Rules Engine, as well as some reasons to use them, what I need is a list of the reasons why you should NOT use a Rules Engine
The best I have so far is this:
Rules engines are not really intended to handle workflow or process
executions nor are workflow engines or process management tools
designed to do rules.
Any other big reasons why you should not use them?
I will give 2 examples from personal experience where using a Rules Engine was a bad idea, maybe that will help:-
On a past project, I noticed that the rules files (the project used Drools) contained a lot of java code, including loops, functions etc. They were essentially java files masquerading as rules file. When I asked the architect on his reasoning for the design I was told that the "Rules were never intended to be maintained by business users".
Lesson: They are called "Business Rules" for a reason, do not use rules when you cannot design a system that can be easily maintained/understood by Business users.
Another case; The project used rules because requirements were poorly defined/understood and changed often. The development team's solution was to use rules extensively to avoid frequent code deploys.
Lesson: Requirements tend to change a lot during initial release changes and do not warrant usage of rules. Use rules when your business changes often (not requirements). Eg:- A software that does your taxes will change every year as taxation laws change and usage of rules is an excellent idea. Release 1.0 of an web app will change often as users identify new requirements but will stabilize over time. Do not use rules as an alternative to code deploy.
I get very nervous when I see people using very large rule sets (e.g., on the order of thousands of rules in a single rule set). This often happens when the rules engine is a singleton sitting in the center of the enterprise in the hope that keeping rules DRY will make them accessible to many apps that require them. I would defy anyone to tell me that a Rete rules engine with that many rules is well-understood. I'm not aware of any tools that can check to ensure that conflicts don't exist.
I think partitioning rules sets to keep them small is a better option. Aspects can be a way to share a common rule set among many objects.
I prefer a simpler, more data driven approach wherever possible.
The one poit I've noticed to be "the double edged sword" is:
placing the logic in hands of non technical staff
I've seen this work great, when you have one or two multidisciplinary geniuses on the non technical side, but I've also seen the lack of technicity leading to bloat, more bugs, and in general 4x the development/maintenance cost.
Thus you need to consider your user-base seriously.
I'm a big fan of Business Rules Engines, since it can help you make your life much easier as a programmer. One of the first experiences I've had while working on a Data Warehouse project was to find Stored Procedures containing complicated CASE structures stretching over entire pages. It was a nightmare to debug, since it was very difficult to understand the logic applied in such long CASE structures, and to determine if you have an overlapping between a rule at page 1 of the code and another from page 5. Overall, we had more than 300 such rules embedded in the code.
When we've received a new development requirement, for something called Accounting Destination, which was involving treating more than 3000 rules, i knew something had to change. Back then I've been working on a prototype which later on become the parent of what now is a Custom Business Rule engine, capable of handling all SQL standard operators. Initially we've been using Excel as an authoring tool and , later on, we've created an ASP.net application which will allow the Business Users to define their own business rules, without the need of writing code. Now the system works fine, with very few bugs, and contains over 7000 rules for calculating this Accounting Destination. I don't think such scenario would have been possible by just hard-coding. And the users are pretty happy that they can define their own rules without IT becoming their bottleneck.
Still, there are limits to such approach:
You need to have capable business users which have an excellent understanding of the company business.
There is a significant workload on searching the entire system (in
our case a Data Warehouse), in order to determine all hard-coded
conditions which make sense to translate into rules to be handled by
a Business Rule Engine. We've also had to take good care that these
initial templates to be fully understandable by Business Users.
You need to have an application used for rules authoring, in which
algorithms for detection of overlapping business rules is implemented. Otherwise you'll end up with a big mess, where no one understands anymore the results they get.
When you have a bug in a generic component like a Custom Business Rule Engine, it can be very difficult to debug and involve extensive tests to make sure that things that worked before also work now.
More details on this topic can be found on a post I've written: http://dwhbp.com/post/2011/10/30/Implementing-a-Business-Rule-Engine.aspx
Overall, the biggest advantage of using a Business Rule Engines is that it allows the users to take back control over the Business Rule definitions and authoring, without the need of going to the IT department each time they need to modify something. It also the reduces the workload over IT development teams, which can now focus on building stuff with more added value.
Cheers,
Nicolae
GREAT article on when not to use a rules Engine...(as well as when to use one)....
http://www.jessrules.com/guidelines.shtml
Another option is if you have a linear set of rules that only apply once in any order to get an outcome is to create a groovy interface and have developers write and deploy these new rules. The advantage is that it is wickedly fast because normally you would pass the hibernate session OR jdbc session as well as any parameters so you have access to all your apps data but in an efficient manner. With a fact list, there can be alot of looping/matching that really can slow the system down.....It's another way to avoid a rules engine and be able to be deployed dynamically(yes, our groovy rules were deployed in a database and we had no recursion....it either met the rule or it didn't). It is just another option.....oh and one more benefit is not learning rules syntax for incoming developers. They have to learn some groovy but that is very close to java so the learning curve is much better.
It really depends on your context. Rules engine have their place and the above is just another option if you have rules on a project that you may want to deploy dynamically for very simplified situations that don't require a rules engine.
BASICALLY do NOT use a rules engine if you have a simple ruleset and can have a groovy interface instead.....just as dynamically deployable and new developers joining your team can learn it faster than the drools language.(but that's my opinion)
In my experience, rules engines work best when the following are true:
Well-defined doctrine for your problem domain
High quality (preferably automated) data to help drive most of your inputs
Access to subject matter experts
Software developers with experience creating expert systems
If any of these four traits are missing, you still might find a rules engine works for you, but every time I've tried it with even 1 missing, I've run into trouble.
That's certainly a good start. The other thing with rules engines is that some things are well-understood, deterministic, and straight-forward. Payroll withholding is (or use to be) like that. You could express it as rules that would be resolved by a rules engine, but you could express the same rules as a fairly simple table of values.
So, workflow engines are good when you're expressing a longer-term process that will have persistent data. Rules engines can do a similar thing, but you have to do a lot of added complexity.
Rules engines are good when you have complicated knowledge bases and need search. Rules engines can resolve complicated issues, and can be adapted quickly to changing situations, but impose a lot of complexity on the base implementation.
Many decision algorithms are simple enough to express as a simple table-driven program without the complexity implied by a real rules engine.
I would strongly recommend business rules engines like Drools as open source or Commercial Rules Engine such as LiveRules.
When you have a lot of business policies which are volatile in nature, it is very hard to maintain that part of the core technology code.
The rules engine provides a great flexibility of the framework and easy to change and deploy.
Rules engines are not to be used everywhere but need to used when you have lot of policies where changes are inevitable on a regular basis.
I don't really understand some points such as :
a) business people needs to understand business very well, or;
b) disagreement on business people don't need to know the rule.
For me, as a people just touching BRE， the benefit of BRE is so called to let system adapt to business change, hence it's focused on adaptive of change.
Does it matter if the rule set up at time x is different from the rule set up at time y because of:
a) business people don't understand business, or;
b) business people don't understand rules?