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Drools

Drools

Overview

What is Drools?

Drools, developed by Red Hat, is a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) designed to streamline and automate decision-making processes. According to the vendor, Drools caters to a wide range of professionals including business analysts, software developers, and data scientists, and finds application...

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Learn from top reviewers

Drools to rule over the rules

Rating: 7 out of 10
April 19, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Drools is used to manage business logic and to make it easy to understand and maintain. Drools helps you manage logic without complete knowledge of code. You concentrate on bu...
Continue reading
Verified user
Engineer
Drools2 years of experience

Drools - Dealing with evolving complexity

Rating: 6 out of 10
January 9, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
In our company, some IT teams adopted JBoss Drools as the rule engine. The applications implemented based on that technology stack, is cross couple of key business departments...
Continue reading
Verified user
Strategist
Drools3 years of experience
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Product Demos

[KIELive#49] Event Driven Drools: CEP (Complex Event Processing) Explained

YouTube

[KieLive#17] Understanding DRL (Drools Rule Language)

YouTube

JBoss BRMS (BPM) Car Insurance Demo

YouTube

Transparent Machine Learning (with Drools and AIX360)

YouTube

jBPM | jBPM Tutorial For Beginners | jBPM Training | Introduction To jBPM Drools | Intellipaat

YouTube

Drools Tutorial | Drools Training | Drools Online Training - Youtube

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Drools?

Drools, developed by Red Hat, is a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) designed to streamline and automate decision-making processes. According to the vendor, Drools caters to a wide range of professionals including business analysts, software developers, and data scientists, and finds application in various industries such as the financial services and healthcare sectors.

Key Features

Drools Workbench (web UI for authoring and management): According to the vendor, this web-based application provides a user-friendly interface for creating, editing, and managing business rules. It supports collaboration among team members, version control, and rule deployment.

Drools Expert (business rules engine): The core component of Drools, it executes business rules written in the Drools rule language (DRL). According to the vendor, it supports both forward and backward chaining rule execution, complex rule conditions and actions, and provides rule evaluation and inference capabilities.

Drools Fusion (complex event processing features): According to the vendor, Drools Fusion enables real-time event processing and complex event detection. It supports event correlation, pattern matching, temporal reasoning, and allows the definition of event-driven rules and actions.

jBPM (process/workflow integration for rule orchestration/flow): With integration to the jBPM workflow engine, Drools allows the seamless integration of business rules with business processes. According to the vendor, it supports the definition and execution of rule-driven workflows, provides flexibility in defining rule execution order, and allows the integration of human tasks and decision points.

OptaPlanner (automated planning): The integration with OptaPlanner constraint solver enables the optimization of resource allocation and scheduling problems. According to the vendor, it supports the definition of optimization constraints and objectives, provides various optimization algorithms and strategies, and allows the integration of automated planning with business rules.

Decision Model and Notation (DMN) support: According to the vendor, Drools offers full runtime support for Decision Model and Notation (DMN) models at Conformance level 3. It allows the execution of DMN decision tables and models, provides a graphical representation of DMN models, and supports the definition of decision logic using DMN expressions and decision tables.

Eclipse IDE plugin for core development: The integration with Eclipse IDE provides a dedicated plugin for Drools rule language (DRL) development. According to the vendor, it offers syntax highlighting, code completion, rule validation features, and enables remote debugging of rule execution.

Maven Central repository availability: Drools is available in the Maven Central repository, simplifying dependency management and integration with Maven-based projects. According to the vendor, it provides access to the latest stable releases, simplifies inclusion in project build configurations, and allows seamless integration with other Java libraries and frameworks.

Drools Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(7)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Drools, with its customizable business logic, has empowered users to tailor software to meet the diverse needs of different clients. By leveraging Drools, users have been able to make informed decisions and take action based on user interactions and specific conditions within BPM tools. Additionally, the flexibility of Drools allows for seamless modification of business rules over time without the need for a complete rebuild. This has proven invaluable in creating object models and writing rules that closely resemble natural language, making it easier for users to understand and implement complex rule sets. Drools has also found success in various domains such as finance, where it has been utilized to apply discounts, rates, and interest calculations based on specific requirements. The ease of separating complex client billing rules from application logic using Drools has significantly improved code maintainability. Furthermore, Drools' integration into different systems like Hadoop ecosystems and change data capture applications demonstrates its capability in solving decision-making problems, cleaning up databases, and processing events efficiently. The multifaceted approach exemplified by Drools is also evident in network security where it manages complex data-driven rules and adapts to new business scenarios effortlessly. Overall, customers have praised Drools for its ability to manage logic without extensive coding knowledge while effectively evolving with new business challenges.

Easy to use and maintain: Several users have found Drools easy to use and maintain while developing their systems. They appreciate how it works well with Java, allowing for a seamless integration of business logic into the drool engine without extensive changes to the software.

Intuitive rule management: Many reviewers liked the ability to manage rules, versioning, and rest-based calls easily in Drools. They also found the user interface intuitive for creating and managing rules, including the option to make drl files. This feature simplifies the process of rule creation and maintenance.

Flexible runtime changes: Users appreciate the flexibility of making runtime changes in Drools without having to rebuild the code. This allows for quick adjustments according to changing business requirements without disrupting the system's functionality or performance.

Difficult to maintain with large number of rules: Some users have found the engine difficult to maintain as the number of rules grew, leading to potential challenges in managing and updating the rule set efficiently.

Lack of available information and resources: Users have mentioned a lack of available information and resources about the software, which can hinder their ability to effectively utilize Drools and address any issues or concerns they may encounter.

Limited support for multiple objects and error handling: Several users have requested better support for multiple objects and improved error handling in Drools, as they currently face difficulties in these areas.

Based on user reviews, the following recommendations have been made for Drools:

  1. Users recommend thoroughly learning the Drools rule engine before implementing it.
  2. Drools is suggested for projects with a lot of condition-based logic or frequent logic changes.
  3. Users recommend using Drools in a microservice architecture and having APIs to call for specific functionality.
  4. It is advised to practice more with Drools to improve proficiency.
  5. Pairing Drools with software that groups alarms based on rule attributes can help reduce noise in reporting.

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
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Drools to rule over the rules

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
April 19, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Drools
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drools is used to manage business logic and to make it easy to understand and maintain. Drools helps you manage logic without complete knowledge of code. You concentrate on business logic only. It is very efficient when it comes to rules evolution when logic evolves with new business problems or capacities.
Pros and Cons
  • Writing rules with business focus
  • Rules evolution and maintenance
  • separate business logic from program code
Likelihood to Recommend
Drools is well suited for big projects where business logic and rules must be separated from program code. So they can evolve when business evolves without being tied to code evolution and deployment.
Most Important Features
  • Versioning
  • Ui to make evolution easy
Return on Investment
  • Separation between code and rules make it easy to evolve with business agenda
  • Error handling was sometimes tricky and required expertise
Alternatives Considered
I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.
Other Software Used

Drools - Dealing with evolving complexity

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
January 09, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Drools
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
In our company, some IT teams adopted JBoss Drools as the rule engine. The applications implemented based on that technology stack, is cross couple of key business departments, from the clearance one to the package sorting automation and control. In both use cases, we have complex data-driven rules to be applied and the rules are frequently adapted or added. Also, the business scenarios require very high system performance.
Pros and Cons
  • We started using the Drools since its early open source version, now Drools has grown to one application suite. We are majorly using the rule engine core Expert. It is very well integrated with our corporate programming language standard - java.
  • We also use Fusion to write rules about events that occur over time, which enhance our capability of dealing with static data and dynamic events for some complex business environment. Also, we like the fact that Fusion fully implements all first-order logic operators, which helps us deal with CEP very well.
  • The new editor UI Guvnor has been improved a lot and the optimization module Solver does a good job to "compile" complex rule flows to gain more performance.
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.
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.
Alternatives Considered
OpenRules provides the non-technical Excel way for a business user to easily modify and manage the rules. Sometimes we found Drools is a little bit overkill for some small and quick projects and we found Roolie is a not bad option as Drools alternative.
Other Software Used
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