[rules-users] Blaze to drools

[Stephen Masters]

That would depend very much on what kind of Blaze app you have. Usually, building a Blaze application is about building a rules management web site based on lots of code templates nested within other code templates. The rules engine itself is a very minor consideration. The corollary would be to use Guvnor, but I would say that it's a long way off being a one-for-one mapping.

Much as I like Guvnor, it doesn't lend itself so well to building such a custom rules management app. It's more about doing things the Guvnor way, which non-technical users tend to find off-putting due to a lot of stuff which looks like code rather than plain English. That is unless you build your own web app in which you embed Guvnor components, or interact with the repository via REST.

Much will depend on how much of the application has been built up with code templates, which do a lot of heavy lifting in the Blaze world. Blaze has very rich capabilities along those lines, making it possible to build simple-seeming decision tables, which do quite complex things underneath. Guvnor is starting to get similar functionality using BRL fragments in decision tables, but that's pretty new, and I would say that if the existing application makes heavy use of nested code templates, then you might struggle to get equivalent functionality in a Guvnor decision table. Likewise, the way Guvnor guided editor works with DSLs is a lot more simplistic than what Blaze provides, so again depending on the complexity of those code templates, what you can do in Guvnor may look rather clunky in comparison.

In general, as a first step it's probably worth having a dig through the app to see how complex the code fragments are. If it has all been built using decision tables, with very little in the way of code fragments, it should be an easy transition.

On a side note, I'm a bit curious what the reasoning is for doing such a re-write. Unless the plan is to run the application on the community supported Drools platform rather than JBPM, the cost of the license wouldn't be an issue. Similarly, although the community is growing, I don't get the impression that there is a very large supply of quality Drools consultants out there.

Steve


On 8 Feb 2013, at 09:59, starfish15 <pooja.ghosh at accenture.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> We have a situation wherein we want to convert rules from Blaze into Drools.
> Basically closed to open source. I would highly appreciate if someone could
> guide me in this case.
> 
> Regards,
> Starfish
> 
> 
> 
> --
> View this message in context: http://drools.46999.n3.nabble.com/Blaze-to-drools-tp4022151.html
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