The rule agent is a Peer to Peer component for runtime deployment of rules/packages/rulebases (well,thats the vision).
In practical terms, its a component you use in any system that requires rules (and the BRMS/IDE can also use it to deploy).
There will be a deployment descriptor where you declare what rulebases are (by name) which you then access in code (one line of code), and how the rulebase is obtained/updated.

Looking at some ideas for deployment config (using file, URI and JGroups respectively):

<ruleBaseConfig>
    <cache dir="..dir for cold start />
    <ruleBase name="myRulebaseFromDir">
        <package name="pkg1"/>
        <package name=" foo.bar.pkg"/>
        <directorySource dir="">
            <poll minutes="10"/>
        </directorySource>
    </ruleBase>

    <ruleBase name="myRulebaseFromURL">
        <package name="pkg1"/>
        <package name="foo.bar.pkg"/>
        <urlSource url="url to BRMS">
            <poll minutes="10"/>
        </urlSource>
    </ruleBase>


    
    <ruleBase name="myRulebaseFromJGroup">
        <package name="pkg1"/>
        <package name="foo.bar.pkg"/>
        <group name="production.group"/>
    </ruleBase>


</ruleBaseConfig>

And in the code you access it like:

RuleBase rb = RuleAgent.instance().getRuleBase("myRulebaseFromJGroup");
... etc...
The rulebase will be updated when the rules are etc.

Comments?