Hi,
 I am currently evaluating Drools for our needs, from the features it seems to be a perfect fit. I am a Java developer, but unfortunately I have no background in enterprise application servers and I am currently stuck trying to setup a testing environment. A short summary of our current setup and how we want to use Drools:

• We are using Storm to accumulate a large number of messages from around the web
• From these we create streams of message metadata (like sentiment) for different topics (like stocks)
• We have additional streams like stock-tickers
• We have a knowledge-base of additional facts about companies (like market cap.) in MySQL
• We want users to be able to define alerts triggered by rules based on these streams and facts

Storm is perfect for the data pre-processing and aggregation, Drools would fit in to allow outsiders to define rules and evaluate them on the streams in realtime. My idea is, to run Drools Fusion as a stand-alone application on a dedicated server or cluster of servers. Drools Guvnor would be used as an interface for the rules. The rules would trigger new events, which would be sent to a subscription channel (like Redis Pub/Sub).

As mentioned above, I have no experience in setting up and running Java application servers. The Drools documentation seems to be very elaborate, but assume that you know how to start such a service from scratch, which I don't. I know Java, but not at an enterprise level, so all the Beans, wars, etc. are new to me. I setup a JBoss AS, which was a pretty easy thing to do, but I am clueless about how to really "run" Drools on it and what to do next.

So what would be the next steps to get a server, where I can send messages to? Are there any tutorials or guidelines which describe how to built such a thing from the very beginning? Any help or suggestion would be very appreciated!

Regards & thanks in advance,
Thomas Söhngen