JBoss Drools Business Rules Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Drooling over JBoss Rules
• Who are you? What's your problem?
• Does this sound like where you work?
• Life or death business rules
• What would you do?
• Business rules in your organization
• Exercise — rules in your organization
• The chocolate factory
• Build your own rule engine in Excel
• Why can't the tech guys write the rules for me?
• Why existing solutions don't cut it
• Rule engines to the rescue
• Other rules (Microsoft Outlook)
• Meet JBoss Rules
• A bit more on open source
• The JBoss Rules community
• Where to get help
• How to ask for help
• The bigger picture
• Members of your team
• How do I write the rules
• Introducing the BRMS (Guvnor)
• Parts of the solution
• Rules editor
• Rules compiler
• Runtime
• Fact model
• Java
• Rule repository
• Rest of the system
• When not to use a rule engine
• Summary

• Chapter 2: Getting the software
• What are we going to install?
• Who should install it?
• Installing Java
• Installing JBoss
• Actual install
• Installing the BRMS/Guvnor
• Installing Eclipse
• Installing the Drools plug-in
• Finding the plug-in
• Installing Maven
• Installing sample projects for this book
• Setting up the sample project in Eclipse
• Getting Maven and Eclipse to work together
• Troubleshooting
• Summary

• Chapter 3: Meet the Guvnor
• Taking a tour with the Guvnor
• Getting started
• General navigation
• The search screen
• Administration
• Loading the samples
• What did we just do?
• More on the admin page
• Rules
• Packages
• Deployment
• QA—Quality Analysis
• Hello World example
• Summary

• Chapter 4: Guided Rules with the Guvnor
• Passing information in and out
• Building the fact model
• Importing the fact model into Guvnor
• Guided rules using the fact model
• The step-by-step answer
• Running this scenario
• What just happened?

• Summary

• Chapter 5: From Guvnor to JBoss IDE
• A more powerful rule
• Have a go
• Updating the rule—step by step
• The When part
• Looking behind the curtain—a text-based rule
• A small problem...
• Rule attributes
• More on the guided editor
• Possible comparisons
• Condition types
• Add more options
• Multiple field constraints
• The Then part
• More rule options and attributes
• Text editing
• Introduction to the JBoss IDE
• Hello World in the JBoss IDE editor
• What just happened?
• Try it yourself
• Summary

• Chapter 6: More rules in the JBoss IDE
• Rule syntax
• Patterns for the When part
• Patterns for the Then part
• Shipping chocolate bars
• The problem (and remind me why I need business rules)
• Why rules scale better—a reminder
• Getting and building the sample
• Rules
• ChocolateShipment.java
• CustomerOrder.java
• OompaLoompaDate
• The RuleRunner file
• MultipleRulesExample
• Running the sample
• Console
• More powerful rule syntax
• Lefthand side
• Righthand side—Then
• Guided editor in the JBoss IDE
• Summary

• Chapter 7: Testing your Rules
• Testing when building rules
• Making testing interesting
• Testing using Guvnor
• Testing using FIT
• Getting FIT
• The FIT requirements document
• Running FIT on our sample
• What just happened?
• What can go wrong?
• The FIT plumbing
• What is unit testing?
• Why unit test?
• Unit testing the Chocolate Shipments sample
• What just happened?
• What if it goes wrong?
• Failures and errors
• Testing an entire package
• Summary

• Chapter 8: Data and Rules in Excel
• Reading data from Excel
• Business rules for this sample
• Getting and running the sample
• Input
• Rules
• Running the sample
• What's going on?
• Under the covers
• More on Cells and Ranges
• Sophisticated, but repetitive rules
• Some Excel magic
• Decision tables behind the scenes
• Header information
• RuleTable—Evaluate the buy trades
• RuleTable—Execute the buy trades
• Other rule tables
• Mixing rules and decision tables
• Running the Chocolate Trading example
• What just happened?
• Have a go
• Summary

• Chapter 9: Domain Specific Language (DSL) and RuleFlow
• What is a Domain Specific Language (DSL)?
• Expanders
• The DSL format
• Other DSL editing options
• Writing DSLs
• Meet the sample
• Running the DSL example
• Guvnor and DSL-based rules
• Ruleflow
• Ruleflow is not workflow
• That Homeloan example again
• Linking rules to Ruleflow
• A quick introduction to stateful applications
• Stateful rules and Ruleflow

• Summary

• Chapter 10: Deploying Rules in Real Life
• One size fits all architecture
• What needs to be deployed?
• Rules as code or data?
• Deployment process
• What's a repository?
• Deploying rules
• Push or pull?
• Loading our rules
• Looking inside RuleRunner.java
• Helper methods
• Public methods
• Stateless
• Stateful
• Alternative method—RuleAgent
• Web deployment
• Maven for packaging

• Summary

• Chapter 11: Looking under the Cover
• Rule engine concepts
• Facts or objects
• Working memory
• Pattern matching, Agenda, and Activations
• Conflict resolution
• A more dynamic Agenda
• Truth maintenance
• Back to the future (with chocolate shipping)
• Logging working memory
• Looking at the working memory log
• Drools Audit Log Viewer
• Rete algorithm
• Rete in action
• Debugging rules
• Debugging rules in the Eclipse IDE
• Rules debug perspective
• Other Drools views while debugging
• When to log, when to test, and when to debug
• Summary

• Chapter 12: Advanced Drools Features
• Pigeons, Drools, and Complex Event Processing
• Implementing Complex Event Processing using Fusion
• More powerful events
• Inline beans
• Loading data when your beans don't exist—Smooks
• From pigeons to biscuits—Drools Solver for your local supermarket
• How Drools Solver works
• Implementing a Solver
• More information on Solver
• Forward and backward chaining
• Changing the conflict resolution methodology
• Standard rule engine API—JSR 94
• Other rule engines
• New API
• Drools flow—a full workflow engine
• New features in Guvnor
• Does this still sound like where you work?
• Summary

• Index