[rules-users] MVEL interpretation

[Wolfgang Laun]

Not being an authority on MVEL's usage in Drools, I can't answer your
question. But I'm somewhat surprised about the motives of your "security
folks" to question "runtime interpretation". Therefore, I'll digress and
highlight a couple of notions. You might discuss them with your boffins.

Take Java. It compiles into byte code, which is interpreted by a JVM (and may
or may not be hotspot compiled at runtime). So, all of your application is
subject to "runtime interpretation".

If you look at the Drools implementation of Rete, you'll find that it represents
rule conditions as a node network, a representation of logic by data. Thus,
any WM updates are (more or less) interpretative.

Compared to these two, any other questions w.r.t. runtime
interpretation  rather secondary, don't you think?

-W

On 26/03/2012, Mike Melton <mike.melton at gmail.com> wrote:
> My team is using Drools on a government project. As is usually the case
> with government projects, the security folks have their hands in every
> aspect of the project. They have big questions on MVEL, but I'm going to
> try to boil them down to one simple question:
>
> At what stage(s) of Drools's lifecycle does MVEL interpretation occur? I
> think that the compilation engine interprets the MVEL at compile time and
> converts it to generated Java code, though I don't know enough about the
> internals of the engine to say for sure. Stated another way, does Drools
> interpret rules written using the MVEL dialect at runtime?
>
> Thanks
> Mike
>