Drools vs. WSO2 Enterprise Integrator

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

The best-suited scenario is the service chain pattern or all patterns used in online mode. The less appropriate scenario is a batch service the duration time of the service is more than 10minutes because it is necessary to increase the HTTP timeout.

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

Incentivized

• Service chain pattern
• Message transformation
• Call more than one backend service
• Call service with different protocoll as the client use
• Use file as input
• Use mail as input

• 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

• View deploy artifact in date time order
• Easy way to map data
• Easy way to manage payload

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

Incentivized

We can start with the community version and then when we moved into production we can buy the supported version. The supported and community version have the same code so we can do every test before deciding to buy the supported version.

• 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

• Reduce development time to the service integration
• We can use junior developer
• Clustered in easy way