Why Drools rules the roost
by Karsten Wade
How do open source tools break out from the pack when it comes to solving real problems for real developers? The answer is in the open source development model and how a subscription and support model comes from that. One gives you a chance to participate in the spectrum of observer/user to contributor, the other lets you benefit from the collective fruits of everyone’s labor in a product that can make your CIO and IT managers happy for many supported years.
To illustrate, let’s discuss a bit about JBoss Drools. Being a more recent introduction into the stable of JBoss.org projects, with the first beta posted on jboss.org in March of 2006, Drools is a project that is producing code at the leading edge of rules engines. At the same time, it is managed as a stable product you can get a subscription to. This makes it easy for turning your skunkworks idea into the next-generation deployment. You can use it as part of a JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployment, or in any Jave EE middleware platform. Once the business logic is in the rules, they are reusable across your SOA. Useful for your business users and technical developers.
To learn more about Drools, take a look at the good technical content in the Drools team blog. There is documentation and you might want to try a quick start approach. We’ve got some good audio and video content from JBoss World about Drools, which is somewhere in the queue of post-production to-do-land. I’ll post about it as soon as it is ready.
