TrustRadius Insights for Drools are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
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.
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
Writing rules with business focus
Rules evolution and maintenance
separate business logic from program code
Cons
Error handling may be difficult
Accurate for big projects, for small projects it may be too much effort
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
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
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.
Cons
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.
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.
VU
Verified User
Strategist in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
