Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Oracle service bus is great to quickly proxy any legacy services exposed as soap service. It's well suited for aggregating multiple services on a single endpoint. We can point to multiple endpoints on the business service and use a round-robin approach to access the endpoints. It's not well suited for data transformation and quick preview of mappings and transformations. It's not great on path to cloud transformation.
Read full review Pros Writing rules with business focus Rules evolution and maintenance separate business logic from program code Read full review The Oracle Service Bus makes the management of web services extremely easy. Through its point and click interface, the web service endpoints can be easily modified. The administration console provides useful dashboards to diagnose any service issues. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Message reporting tied to a database seems counter productive. Better options to eliminate that would not only minimize the maintenance hassle but also gives more ease to manage the product. Polling feature isn't very efficient where the end point JMS queues may still have JMS connections despite not enabling the corresponding poller proxy services. Unable to deploy multiple web services in one go from the OSB Web console. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have had not many issues with Oracle Service Bus and it's very stable for our requirements. It's highly available and helps us implement Tier1 applications on it.
Read full review Usability It's an excellent enterprise service bus and has very stable features. We have been using it since 2008. We did hit into some issues. But, recreating the service helped fix many issues. Also, deployment to various environments was easy. Also, the plugin on Eclipse helps to build proxy and business services quick and easy.
Read full review Support Rating We had some issues with MQ connectivity through OSB and our experience was poor with the support team. They do respond. But, it felt like we are ignored and we had bad support. We had to escalate and things used to get dragged for weeks before we get more quality questions on how to pursue investigation.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.
Read full review Oracle being the market leader and has a lot of compatibilities with sources like SOA projects, Oracle database and other JMS feeds.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Improve customer relations/service Create internal/operational efficiencies Improve business process outcomes Improve compliance & risk management Strong services expertise Pre-existing relationships Strong consulting partnership Product functionality and performance Read full review ScreenShots