[rules-users] Looking for a place to start with drools

[Gustavo Tenrreiro]

Hi Dean,

I ve only been working with Drools for about a couple of months.
My first impression was that it was a great tool and very
straightforward. But as I got deeper into it, I found a lot of
gotchas, and things I didn't quite understand how they worked ( for
many I still don't ). Finding definitive answers to those questions
has been hard. Even though this forum, as well as the IRC chat are
very helpful, the flow of information is somewhat limited.
If what you are doing has some complexity beyond the simple examples
provided by the documentation, and sample code, then you will probably
get stuck at some point, and burn a lot of time trying to figure out
the problem.

So if you are on a tight budget that requires tight deadlines using
Drools to replace your existing code would be a high risk proposition
I believe.

On the other hand, the Drools's potential to simplify, and streamline
my system is great. if I manage to get it to do what I want it to do
it would be a huge win for my organization, and the Drools system
would be mostly responsible for that.

So to summarise, jumping into the Drools bandwagon would be an
"educated bet", but a bet nonetheless.

Hope that helps.

Thanks


2010/9/16 Dean Whisnant <dean at basys.com>:
> I am investigating using Drools for our company’s EDI processing.  The
> nature of our software system is that each of our clients (dozens) has a
> full distribution of our base software and in the past we would make custom
> changes to that base software at each of their sites based upon their
> trading partners and business needs. For the most part these changes
> involved nothing more than if-then statements for rather simple logic, but
> that would become complicated at certain customers where there were large
> numbers of trading partners and specific customer needs.  In general we saw
> 2,000 lines of code swell to 4-6,000 lines of code.
>
>
>
> We are in the process of rewriting this portion of our code and are
> entertaining using drools to allow us to 1) create a standard ruleset, 2)
> create a ruleset specific to a trading partner (many customers share some
> common trading partners), and 3) create a customer business ruleset that
> they can maintain through some GUI tool (Guvnor).
>
>
>
> So far, I’ve created a sample java program that has classes representing
> some of our data files (UniData environment using uniobjects) and have been
> working with a single .drl file to test out general rules.  I appear to be
> able to write just about any rule I’ve needed in the past with no issues,
> including rules that spawn processes within my native software.
>
>
>
> These are my questions:
>
>
>
> 1.       How would you package these types of rules?  I have three
> categories as stated above and it seems logical that I would package them in
> that manner.  However within each group there are logical groupings of
> rules.  In the customer rules I may have a couple dozen on how to populate a
> field that deals with adding comments and another couple dozen having to
> deal with setting certain fields with specific codes that are based upon
> incoming data.  Two quite different logical areas within our software.
>
> 2.       How would you deal with the GUI? Is Guvnor truly something I can
> setup in a way that my end users can manipulate without “damaging” the
> custom ruelset?
>
> 3.       Within Guvnor, how would you handle the possibility of there being
> over 2,000 fields to choose from to form a rule?
>
> 4.       What is the performance hit if we were to make each customer rule
> part of once decision table or another? Would you even consider this as an
> option?
>
>
>
> Thank you!
>
>
>
> --Dean
>
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