If you want to hot-deploy rule changes, just take a look at the documentation on knowledge agents or KieScanner (v6). It’s also easy enough to code a knowledge base reload yourself.

However, you say:

Ideally we would like business users to add or modify rules in Production without risk of crashing entire rules engine.

Rules and facts are code, so changes could crash your system if written poorly. Supporting hot deployment does not mean that you don’t need to regression test your changes. All it means is that you can break your system much more quickly than before.

The only way to get around this is to write your own UI, which prevents users from making any rules or fact changes that ‘break’ your system. How you achieve that is very much dependent on what you want users to change and how much time you are prepared to spend writing automated tests to prevent breaking changes from being deployed.

Steve


On 21 Apr 2014, at 16:21, Pykhtin, Alex <apykhtin@ebay.com> wrote:

Anyone can tell if Drools supports hot deployment of rules and fact types?
 
We are using Drools rules (No Guvnor/Workbench), and the whole cycle Development-Test-Production takes a very long time. Ideally we would like business users to add or modify rules in Production without risk of crashing entire rules engine. But as of today, any rule or fact type change is subject to full regression testing, as any other of our Java code. I tried to experiment with Drools Workbench, but so far it doesn’t look like it can help much with hot deployment. Workbench can greatly streamline the development and deployment process, but generally speaking, since all Drools boils down to Java, it is essentially another jar deployment. So, it looks like if we would want to simplify our production deployments, the only option is to abolish the QA cycle for Drools jars (which our QA will probably never agree to).
 
Any ideas?
 
Thanks,
Alex
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