David Pautler wrote:
I'm evaluating Drools and other RMSs, looking for one that provides the following features:

1) Citation tracking. I need to note what articles or scenarios motivated a rule, and be able to provide a short description of how the rule supports each. This goes beyond commenting because I need to have access to a list of all articles and scenarios used and be able to jump to the rules that hang from them.
Not quite sure what you mean, this is an addition you want to the rule language itself? Can you provide more details, maybe we can help you work on this.

2) Jess rule language. Our team has a symbolic AI background, and Drools' language is non-intuitive to us. It appears that Drools is built on Jess, and Jess' language would work much better for us. Is there a way to use Jess' language, including intellisense support?
Drools is not built on Jess or related to Jess in anyway, other than that we all have our own implementations of the Rete algorithm and have followed many of the features implemented in Clips, which itself was derived from ART. The Drools DRL language itself was designed as a more intuitive and less verbose language, this becomes increasinly important as you start to add more complex syntax which becomes harder to read with a lisp approach. I think most people in here would agree that the Drools DRL approach is an improvement over the lisp approach of clips/jess - apart from the die hard lisp fans.

That said I have an experimental project to provide some level of clips support. See this blog for detalis:
http://blog.athico.com/search/label/Clips

Drools was designed from the start to work with pojos, Jess has an internal data structure that the pojos must be copied into. For this reason our performance compared to Jess when working with pojos is atleast double. Drools 5.0 also has a new more robust Rete algorithm, that is not subject to inconsistencies affecting modify and retract, we call this assymetrical Rete, rather than Jess' symmetrical Rete. Further to this our Rete supports partitioning for parallel evaluation, which was needed for our CEP work.

Drools 5.0 will also have so many more features than Jess, that Jess is no longer really any competition. The main feature additions will be temporal reasoning support for CEP. And a powerful web based BRMS. See M1 release notes for details of CEP:
http://blog.athico.com/2008/07/drools-50-m1-new-and-noteworthy.html



3) Export to sourceforge. Our deployments involve exporting the rulebase and associated citation tracking to sourceforge or google code. That is, we want to deploy text rather than binaries. Is there a better way to do this than a simple db export?

I've checked the user manuals and list archives for each of these questions but wasn't able to answer them for myself.
Again not really sure what you are discussing, wouldn't just putting the .drl up at sourceforce achieve this?

Btw if you do continue your research on Drools, I would encourage to put your details and your research up on the Drools Research Network page, and also join the mailing list: We have a student working on uncertaintity at the moment, his work is being presented at RuleML08 this year, this should be of interest to many people in research.

http://www.jboss.org/drools/research-network.html

Mark

David
 

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