[rules-users] Integrating Drools with rules from a legacy BRMS

[bdolbeare]

I am working on integrating Drools with a legacy BRMS that was developed
in-house.  The customers like the BRMS and are unwilling to migrate to
another tool such as Guvnor.  The BRMS creates the rules in a proprietary
XML format.  In order to integrate Drools with the BRMS, I need to convert
these rules to a format that Drools understands and that leaves me with what
seems like 3 options:

1) Write some XSLT to transform the proprietary XML to Drools XML format. 
This seems straightforward; however, I am concerned that the online
documentation states that the Drools XML format should be considered
deprecated. I'd hate to invest much time in this approach if the XML support
is going to disappear in a future release.

2) Write my own parser that can convert the proprietary XML to classes in
the org.lang.descr package. I'm not sure if the Drools developers intend for
others to use these classes directly.  For instance, if they change
frequently, this approach may be difficult to maintain. 

3) Write my own parser that can convert the proprietary XML to DRL.  This
approach seems unfortunate in that the rules would be parsed twice; first to
convert them to DRL and then internally by the Drools DrlParser.  Also, this
doesn't seem to offer any benefit over approach 2 (except that I know DRL
well and wouldn't have to learn how the org.lang.descr classes work [not
much documentation in those classes]).

Right now, I'm leaning towards approach 2.  Any thoughts or suggestions
would be appreciated.

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