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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blog.athico.com/2012/07/drools-55-60-and-future.html">http://blog.athico.com/2012/07/drools-55-60-and-future.html</a><br>
--- copied from blog article ---<br>
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Some time soon we will branch master.
The current master will be branched to 5.5 and then master will
become 6.0.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
I
hope we can release a 5.5 within the next 4-5 months; this may
very
depending on the impact of other commitments.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</div>
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<br>
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General rule syntax</div>
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<a href="https://community.jboss.org/wiki/Drools60">https://community.jboss.org/wiki/Drools60</a></div>
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<br>
</div>
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The event sequencing draft can be found
here:</div>
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<a href="https://community.jboss.org/wiki/EventSequencing">https://community.jboss.org/wiki/EventSequencing</a><br>
<br>
</div>
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The functional programming aspects are
still being explored on this wiki page:</div>
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<a
href="https://community.jboss.org/wiki/FunctionalProgrammingInDrools">https://community.jboss.org/wiki/FunctionalProgrammingInDrools</a></div>
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<br>
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We will eventually roll the later two back in the Drools60
document, to provide a single document that covers the 6.0
language specific.</div>
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<br>
</div>
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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.</div>
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<br>
</div>
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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).</div>
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<a href="http://www.jboss.org/drools/irc">http://www.jboss.org/drools/irc</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.jboss.org/drools/lists">http://www.jboss.org/drools/lists</a></div>
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Here goes nothing!!! </div>
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Mark</div>
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