Drools vs. Progress Corticon Business Rules Engine

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

Suited for any place where complex business rules need to be separated for ease of flexibility.

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

Incentivized

• Handle complex business rules.
• Test different scenarios after changes have been made.
• Allow for version control and auditing of queries and responses.

• 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

• The UI could be made more appealing.

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

Incentivized

Corticon is way easier and allows for testing.

• 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

• It has definitely had a positive ROI. Instead of having developers try to figure out these complex rules and how to code them in a flexible way, we now have business analysts using Corticon.