I am a graduate student working on rules based systems in design. I had a very fundamental (theoretical) question

on rules usage and would appreciate if you could be so kind as to help.

Consider a hypothetical university application that has the following objects:

GradStudentRecord (which contains details such as GPA etc.)

GIven the above(and based on the drools docs I have read so far)

I can write a rule as:

when GradStudent.Record.GPA > 3 then student.standing = good

So far everything is okay.

Now consider the case where the University decides to have PhD Students.

Note that there are no PhDStudent objects in the application yet but

I wish to have a rule such as:

when PhDStudentRecord.GPA > 3.5 then student.standing = good

Does the above scenario mean that I would have to code the application

and add an extra PhDStudent object before I can write a rule ?

In other words, is the following proposition true?

Proposition: if there are N objects in an application, and I wish to use

JBoss rules then the rule can be written only "in terms" of the N objects.

If there is a rule to be written for a new (K+1)th object, I would have to first code

that new object in the application and then write the rule.

I would appreciate if anyone could validate my thoughts above.

Sincerely,

Anup

GradStudent