[rules-dev] drools 5.5, 6.0 and roadmap

[Mark Proctor]

5.5 will remain JDK5 complaint. 6.0 will move to JDK6.

We will provide migration scripts from 5.x.

Mark
On 04/07/2012 04:32, Mark Proctor wrote:
> http://blog.athico.com/2012/07/drools-55-60-and-future.html
> --- copied from blog article ---
> Some time soon we will branch master. The current master will be 
> branched to 5.5 and then master will become 6.0.
>
> We will develop 5.5 and 6.0 in parallel. In general we will try to 
> apply as many bug fixes and stable features to both branches, for as 
> long as it's practically possible. At some point 6.0 will diverge too 
> much and the cost will become too high.
>
> I hope we can release a 5.5 within the next 4-5 months; this may very 
> depending on the impact of other commitments.
>
> 6.0 will be a longer term effort, and will involve the most drastic 
> changes at both the engine and language level to date. The engine 
> algorithm will be almost completely new, and will no longer be 
> considered a Rete implementation. Instead it will be a lazy collection 
> oriented matching algorithm, that will support adaptive network 
> topologies. First we'll deliver the lazy matching algorithm and then 
> shift to collection oriented. The adaptive network topologies will 
> take more time and may deliver after 6.0. These engine changes will 
> lay the ground work for exploiting multi-cpu architectures, and 
> durable backing stores (Active Databases). I also hope we can 
> integrate our engine with a tableaux algorithm, to provide seamless 
> description logic capabilities for semantic ontologies; but that's 
> still a very open research area, with many unknowns.
>
> 6.0 will most likely retain api comparability (no current plans to 
> break it), however the DRL syntax will be broken. DRL has been 
> backwards compatible, excluding bugs and regressions, for almost 7 
> years now. We plan to take this opportunity to revamp DRL, as we fully 
> embrace becoming a hybrid reasoning engine. We will fully explore 
> passive, reactive, relational and functional programming styles. The 
> hope is we can create a declarative language system, more flexible and 
> more suitable for a wider range of solutions. I also really want to 
> address some of the usability problems associated with rule execution 
> control, particularly around salience and the various rule groups 
> (agenda-groups, ruleflow-groups, activation-groups). Relative salience 
> and a single concept around a flexible RuleModule will hopefully make 
> this possible. We have to start making things easier, simpler and more 
> consistent.
>
> We are just starting to flesh out our designs, figuring out what works 
> and what doesn't. All are at the very early stages, much has not yet 
> been added, and everything is open to debate.
>
> General rule syntax
> https://community.jboss.org/wiki/Drools60
>
> The event sequencing draft can be found here:
> https://community.jboss.org/wiki/EventSequencing
>
> The functional programming aspects are still being explored on this 
> wiki page:
> https://community.jboss.org/wiki/FunctionalProgrammingInDrools
>
> We will eventually roll the later two back in the Drools60 document, 
> to provide a single document that covers the 6.0 language specific.
>
> The web based tooling is also under going a revamp. It will offer a 
> more flexible workbench like experience where all panels are plugins, 
> with support for perspectives. This will allow us to build a 
> consistent and unified approach to our web tooling efforts across 
> Drools&jBPM. We also have a mechanism now that will allow our web 
> based components, such as decision tables and guided editors to be 
> used in Eclipse -- to create a consistent experience between the two 
> environments. We have back ported the java7 vfs api and have a Git 
> implementation for this, we will also continue provide a JCR 
> implementation. So far Git is looking extremely scalable and easy to 
> use. JGit provides a full java implementation, making out of the box 
> use easy. Stay tuned for more news. Hopefully in less then 2 months we 
> will have some early proof of concepts to show, for the web based efforts.
>
> If you want to help make history happen, joins us on irc (real time 
> chat). You can also leave comments on the wiki pages or the mailing 
> lists (developer list).
> http://www.jboss.org/drools/irc
> http://www.jboss.org/drools/lists
>
> Here goes nothing!!!
>
> Mark
>


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