Drools vs. Higson

As an open source rule engine and product suite, Drools is well suited for the small and middle scale business to manage and integrate the rules to build the rule-driven system which can process the business-critical data and events to produce the automated decision. It is better to use Drools in the well-secured environment (back-end behind the DMZ), not putting it on the customer-facing front or exposing it directly the to public where may bring direct security risk in the enterprise environment. Drools still needs a lot hardening on the security side.

Incentivized

Hyperon is less appropriate in smaller projects that do not contain a lot of business logic. However, if there are a lot of business rules to manage, many things that might be frequently changed, then Hyperon is a good tool to address it.

• Writing rules with business focus
• Rules evolution and maintenance
• separate business logic from program code

Incentivized

• Separation of business logic from the app's code
• Decision table performance
• Good GUI

• Fusion doesn't support persistence of working memory, which brings some extra high availability risk to our business.
• Guvnor still has a lot room to be implemented, it is not so user-friendly for non-technical people, so a lot of business users complain it is hard to master.
• Rule execution server doesn't even have JMX implemented, hard to be monitored.
• Drools is still lacking support for key Web services standards.

Incentivized

• Pretty high entry threshold
• A few bugs in GUI
• UX might be better in some places

It's a very good tool to manage business rules. There are certain GUI bugs and a code boilerplate, but overall it does its job really well.

There is documentation on the site to help learn about the tool. There is also an email to ask for help or any other questions. The team responds quickly with a full answer.

I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.

Incentivized

Hyperon has got far better performance. It also has far better GUI to manage business rules. On the other hand, Drools has a bigger community to help you with your problems.

• The IT department quickly adopted Drools as it is a very good java-based rule engine, which saves a lot of time to meet the project timeline and balanced our business requirements.
• Recently we start considering the OpenRules, which may be more business user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Shorter time to market with new features
• Business users might change things without the help of developers