Drools vs. Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

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

JBoss EAP is subscription based/open source platform. It's very reliable and great for deploying high transaction Java based enterprise applications. It integrates well with third party components like mod_cluster and supports popular Java EE web-based frameworks such as Spring, Angular JS, jQuery Mobile, and Google Web Toolkit.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• MOD_CLUSTER integration. JBoss EAP integrates pretty well with mod_cluster. This is an intelligent load balancer especially useful in highly clustered environments.
• Supports enterprise-grade features such as high availability clustering, distributed caching, messaging etc.
• Supports deployment in on-premise, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.

Incentivized

• 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

• Difficult to replicate configuration outside of a container environment
• Still requires quite a bit of knowledge of the CLI
• Integration with deployment tools requires CLI knowledge

Incentivized

We are planning to migrate away from Jboss to Tomcat as Jboss has shown not interest in supporting OSGi which is heavily used at our shop

Incentivized

JBoss overall is easy to use. The installation and deployment of applications are quick. Documentations and support are also readily available.

Incentivized

JBoss EAP is lightweight and doesn't really consumes much physical resources. It's high performing and suites well for high transaction Java enterprise applications. The out of box performance settings are not really great and you will have to configure the settings to suite your environment to leverage it's full benefits.

Incentivized

Fast response.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We selected JBoss because of compatibility with EJB's. We currently are trying to reduce our footprint and will highly consider using Tomcat.

Incentivized

• 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

• Jboss EAP is easy to deploy and configure. This lead to lower cost and faster delivery.
• Even though we have large number of machines running JBoss, we have only two Jboss Administrators. It doesn't requires too much administration and maintenance on daily basis and reduces number of administrators required for large implementations.

Incentivized