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Drools, with its customizable business logic, has empowered users to tailor software to meet the diverse needs of different clients. By …
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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Product Demos
[KIELive#49] Event Driven Drools: CEP (Complex Event Processing) Explained
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[KieLive#17] Understanding DRL (Drools Rule Language)
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JBoss BRMS (BPM) Car Insurance Demo
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Transparent Machine Learning (with Drools and AIX360)
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jBPM | jBPM Tutorial For Beginners | jBPM Training | Introduction To jBPM Drools | Intellipaat
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Drools Tutorial | Drools Training | Drools Online Training - Youtube
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Product Details
- About
- Tech 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 Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
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:
- Users recommend thoroughly learning the Drools rule engine before implementing it.
- Drools is suggested for projects with a lot of condition-based logic or frequent logic changes.
- Users recommend using Drools in a microservice architecture and having APIs to call for specific functionality.
- It is advised to practice more with Drools to improve proficiency.
- Pairing Drools with software that groups alarms based on rule attributes can help reduce noise in reporting.
Reviews
(1-2 of 2)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 19, 2022
Drools to rule over the rules
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.
- Writing rules with business focus
- Rules evolution and maintenance
- separate business logic from program code
- Error handling may be difficult
- Accurate for big projects, for small projects it may be too much effort
- Versioning
- Ui to make evolution easy
- Separation between code and rules make it easy to evolve with business agenda
- Error handling was sometimes tricky and required expertise
I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.
January 09, 2019
Drools - Dealing with evolving complexity
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.