[rules-users] Who writes your rules? Dev vs. BA

[Vincent Legendre]

Just to bounce on DSL considerations

For me DSL as they are provided in guided editor are not suitable for 
real-life projects, because :
   - parsing is too simple, and then force the rule writer to have a 
good idea of how it work, and what is behind the DSL phrase they use.
   - the guided editor do not have a kind of contextual filtering for 
phrases, so all the phrases come in sequence in the dialog box. This 
quickly become unpraticable for large object models
In some way, I think that coding all rules with DSL is reserved to 
Developers, but can produce rules that could be read (and validated) by 
BA. Note that this could be a good way to produce rules (one Dev coding, 
one BA validating)

So I try to make BA use directly the guided editor, which provide a way 
to edit rules using objects, then their attributes, and finally their 
values. This is the kind of contextual way of presenting concepts that 
is lacking in DSL (like what can be done by JRules BOM). I only use a 
very limited set of DSL phrase for special predicates or actions if I 
can't easily add a method in my BO.


Some other remarks. Someone told that DSL are convenient for having 10 
files exploded in 100 rules. I think that in this case, spreadsheets are 
far much adapted. I agree with Wolfgang that really often, 80% - 90% of 
rules can be written using tables, enabling BA to handle almost all 
their rules.