I've started to write up what a "project" would look like for Drools and jBPM. The idea is to move away from progammatic apis and have everything done via a maven plugin, using conventions and configurations to make it all work. Also we want to make sure this works well with tooling. We want to right click and execute projects, without use having to enter boiler plate code. Please consider it a work in progress, it's still rough in some places and RuleModule is still very sketchy. https://community.jboss.org/wiki/DroolsProject I use the term Bundle to refer to zipped up deployable Project key aspects to note on compromises to simplify things: -single root classloader per project (currently per knowledge base) -each knowledgebase has it's own resource path folder, all files below that are for that specific knowledge base -move functions and type declarations out to their own resource path folder. With the classloader scoped at the project level, no point in having these under the knowledge base path. This is the sort of project anyone in the community can pick up and run with, you don't need a deep understanding of drools or rule engines. Just how to build a maven plugin, although there will be a small amount of fiddly work around the classloader change, but that shouldn't be too hard. http://www.jboss.org/drools/irc Mark