[rules-users] What's the difference between Drools and other constraints solvers?

[Davide Sottara]

My 2 cents on some side aspects of this debate (which I leave to Geoffrey :))

Most LP solvers are written in C/C++, which is great for efficiency but also
a limitation on portability
and platform (in)dependence. Provided that you find a version of the code
that compiles in your 
specific environment. There are a couple of java interfaces (e.g. GLPK), but
they do not solve the problem.
I run a linux-64 ubuntu machine and had a VERY HARD time last time I tried (
~1 year ago )

Choco is written in java and has a very permissive license model, unlike the
others which are either 
commercial or GPLx, but the last time I tried it ( ~6 months ago ) it was
still suffering from some numerical computation problems. I had it almost
stuck in a local plateau for several seconds while 
trying to solve a small minimization problem with ~4 variables and ~10
constraints. 

@Geoffrey: but can Planner be used effectively - i.e. with little overhead -
for LP optimization problems, 
including the integer-LP and the mixed-LP variants? And quadratic ones?




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