Drools vs. Spotfire Streaming

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

Taking data from various sources including files, databases, web services, applying some complex rules, transforming, aggregating and producing a result. This is what Spotfire Streaming does best.
- If one needs connectivity to special services as secured databases or web services, building interactive web apps, those are probably tasks that shall be addressed with different tools.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Processing events in real-time with real low latency and high throughput.
• 100% visual program language, which can be extended by common languages like Java, Python and .NET.
• Reduced time to prototype, create an application and deployment, which reduces the software lifecycle.
• Real robust engine and server. Barely heard of customers having issues in production.

• 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

• Not all problems are suited to the event driven paradigm.
• As the complexity of an application grows, finding your way around code in the GUI takes some getting used to.
• The Spotfire Streaming development environment is built in Eclipse, which is not everyone's cup of tea.

Spotfire Streaming support is prompt and to the point. They help with best practices and learning from existing projects.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We are using Dataflow (by Google).The development time in Spotfire Streaming is definitely shorter because its GUI based. Dataflow handles late arrivals after the window closes, not sure Spotfire Streaming can do that. Dataflow can run GCP as a managed service which is why we chose that tool for our new product.

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

• While we haven't specifically integrated Spotfire Streaming into our product development, it has allowed us to see the benefits of real-time streaming data.
• We have much more visibility into how our longer term roadmap will look and what we should focus on.

Incentivized