[rules-users] (Hot?) rules production deployment

[Wolfgang Laun]

Another technique to prevent non-programmers to wreak havoc is to
put them on the leash of a domain specific language (DSL). But developing
a non-trivial DSL is hard work, and you might find that you just spend
your money in a different way. Moreover, anything that's not too
restrictive must, by definition, provide enough leeway to enable
the non-programmers to program nonsense: this won't crash the
system but it sure will annoy the users.

The claim that "our business users write rules" is very frequently
based on them typing, into a spreadsheet or similar, parameters
for a small, limited number of rule templates, which are then
replicated by filling in constant values...

-W

On 22/04/2014, Stephen Masters <stephen.masters at me.com> wrote:
> If you want to hot-deploy rule changes, just take a look at the
> documentation on knowledge agents or KieScanner (v6). It's also easy enough
> to code a knowledge base reload yourself.
>
> However, you say:
>
> 	Ideally we would like business users to add or modify rules in Production
> without risk of crashing entire rules engine.
>
> Rules and facts are code, so changes could crash your system if written
> poorly. Supporting hot deployment does not mean that you don't need to
> regression test your changes. All it means is that you can break your system
> much more quickly than before.
>
> The only way to get around this is to write your own UI, which prevents
> users from making any rules or fact changes that 'break' your system. How
> you achieve that is very much dependent on what you want users to change and
> how much time you are prepared to spend writing automated tests to prevent
> breaking changes from being deployed.
>
> Steve
>
>
> On 21 Apr 2014, at 16:21, Pykhtin, Alex <apykhtin at ebay.com> wrote:
>
>> Anyone can tell if Drools supports hot deployment of rules and fact
>> types?
>>
>> We are using Drools rules (No Guvnor/Workbench), and the whole cycle
>> Development-Test-Production takes a very long time. Ideally we would like
>> business users to add or modify rules in Production without risk of
>> crashing entire rules engine. But as of today, any rule or fact type
>> change is subject to full regression testing, as any other of our Java
>> code. I tried to experiment with Drools Workbench, but so far it doesn't
>> look like it can help much with hot deployment. Workbench can greatly
>> streamline the development and deployment process, but generally speaking,
>> since all Drools boils down to Java, it is essentially another jar
>> deployment. So, it looks like if we would want to simplify our production
>> deployments, the only option is to abolish the QA cycle for Drools jars
>> (which our QA will probably never agree to).
>>
>> Any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
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>
>