[rules-users] Spring and Drools

[Stephen Masters]

Hi folks,

This may well be rather premature, but I have been knocking up a little example project to demo a web application built with Spring 4 and Drools 6. Notably, *not* using the Drools Spring componentry because I prefer to roll my own Spring components. It gives me a lot of freedom to make things work how I like. I mention this, as there seem to be a lot of folks on this list with problems relating to getting their Drools Spring XML config working, and I wanted to show how easy it is to roll your own. There’s really not much code involved.

To try it out:
	git clone git at github.com:gratiartis/qzr.git
	cd qzr
	mvn clean install
	cd qzr-web
	mvn tomcat7:run

And open: http://localhost:9090/

It seems to work fine on OSX and Windows 7. Hopefully it works for other platforms too.

As I mention, this may be somewhat premature, because the application is very much a work in progress (likely to be refactored lots!) and doesn’t do a lot yet. It creates a KieSession attached to the HTTP session of each user, so that users can have a chatty relationship with the rules engine. There is a web page which uses JavaScript to call a REST API to get data such as “questions”, which have been inferred in the rules engine. The idea being to have a conversation whereby the rules engine asks a question and the user’s response will be inserted as a knew ‘known’ fact. The rules are fired again to determine what is now known and what additional questions should be asked.

I have plenty of vague ideas relating to future functionality, so I’ll be beavering away at it. However, if anybody has thoughts on functionality which would be worth demoing, then feel free to fire your thoughts in my direction and I’ll see what I can do. If anybody looks closely enough to spot any bugs, then feel free to mention them (I think you can raise issues on the GitHub project), although there’s a pretty good chance that they’re just incomplete functionality.

Hopefully it’s useful to someone. Enjoy!

Steve