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Drools - Dealing with evolving complexity
January 09, 2019

Drools - Dealing with evolving complexity

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Drools

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.
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.