Customer Reviews

Drools JBoss Rules 5.0 Developer's Guide

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Given that there aren't many books out there, this is probably one of the best. However, it didn't meet my needs as it spent much of the available space "selling" me on how to use a rules engine and not enough on specific, "atomic", example code. I've been using JRules (IBM/ILOG commercial BRMS) for six years now and I am looking for an open source alternative as that product is essentially out of reach for the Small to Medium sized Business (SMB) due to the way it is marketed. I don't need "selling" on the value of BRMS technology to developers and businesses. I've lived it first hand. BRMS's will be to the coming generation what DBMS's were to us back in the 80's. Drools looks to be the odds on contender for winning developer mind-share but the issue at hand is helping developers get over the initial learning curve. So much of this kind of book tries to do too much and ends up being like trying to learn to fly using a 747 instead of a Cessna. What we need are some basic books on "flying" BRMS's. For example, instead of using a full fledged system as an example, it would be better to describe basic "flight maneuvers." Showing some simple POJO implementations of BRMS for replacing the data validation code on a typical data entry form would be more immediately useful than trying to wrap your mind around a complete business system. The focus needs to be on some basic building blocks to "get your feet wet" with this specific product and ignite interest via early experience. I'm afraid many developer's will lose interest because they have to wade through too much "set up" to get to any "reward." This book, while valuable, falls short and is typical of the approach that seems popular among many approaches to BRMS education. When learning to "fly" you start with basics and then combine them into more complex scenarios. This book would be much better if it started with small self contained building block scenarios and built from them. Instead, it starts with a complete project. Too much time ends up being spend on outlining the "project." As developers we are already looking for a better solution for implementing the "model" and "controller" pieces of our MVC work. We don't need to spend time being convinced of that. I'd like to see a book for this product that was written more like a basic flight primer. You want to give that prospective "pilot" their first "ride" and get them hooked on actually flying. This book is too much like just buying a ticket on a commercial airline and watching someone else fly than getting your hands on the controls. It won't do nearly as good a job of attracting "new pilots" to this technology as it could have. BRMS technology has been around for a while but only the privileged few have really gotten to fully taste what it can do for you. It will likely be the "next big thing" in software development and Drools, like MySQL, PHP and other "freely" available technologies stands poised to be "discovered" by developers that really need to get into this genre to go to the next level in their development. Unfortunately, this book falls short in giving them what they need to quickly get going with Drools by trying to cover too much theory and not enough simple practice topics (like simple form validation code.) There isn't much out there yet so it's better than just trying to read the on-line docs but it doesn't leave you feeling like you could start writing code in your own projects. That's the big gap as yet unfilled in this genre.

This book is almost a disgrace to the community of proponents of the rule-based paradigm. Since graduate school in the early 90s, I have been actively consulting in this space as well as developing my own apps. My rules background is deep. I picked this up so I could hit the ground running using Drools instead of the $30K a license Blaze/jRules junk I work with at client sites during the day. It is poorly written, poorly designed, poorly printed and like another review here said, offers maybe 10% of the important info you need to be capable at using Drools. Between this horrible book and the Websites dealing with Drools material, there is NO meaningful current documentation to help one be productive using Drools. With no help getting started from this book and other sources, I abandoned my idea of using Drools altogether. Jess is a way better option in my mind--and that is free software as well. Too bad you have to give this a single star to submit the review. Doesn't even one STAR imply value?? This book has none! ZERO stars.

I have purchased the kindle edition. I have only one complaint: the example codes, both XML and Java codes, are not easy to view and understand because there are not formatted with indentations. The texts are all left justified. I had to cut and paste them onto Eclipse editor and do 'source format' to really understand the illustration codes. I am going to purchase the hardcopy now.

I bought this hoping to get a deeper understanding of working with Drools and to have a handy reference throughout my project. It was a small help in conceptually understanding how Drools works. But this books skims the top 10% of what you need to know to work with Drools. Every time I have reached for this book to try to answer a question I had, without fail, this book NEVER had the answer. Every time I searched the index, the index never even contained the search term I looked for.

My project is not terribly complex but this book has been pretty much useless. Hopefully, another publisher will come out with a book on Drools. This one isn't really adding much to the Drools community.

This book is extremely poorly written. The book does not clearly explain basic concepts dealing with rudimentary drools syntax. The early code snippets are disjointed and difficult to follow. No complete code listings showing all the imports...). No clear explanations or decent examples which show good ways of loading your info into the rule base. I had to "piece" his explanations together with the awful documentation from drools.org to get a semblance of understanding of what the hell was going on.

The chapter on decision tables was INCREDIBLY sparse and DID not clearly outline the structure of the expected spreadsheet. And again, no complete code examples...

Just disjointed snippets not seemingly belonging to any unified project and prematurely polluted with junit crap. This book drove me nuts. Thank God I didn't pay for it, borrowed it from a colleague. I was eager to learn drools, but am dissuaded now by the lack of meaningful books and web documentation. I need a drink.

Save your money.

Please see my response to the 5 star review above. How in the world anyone could rate this book 5 stars is way beyond me.

I'd say this book is a good resource for someone who is already familiar with writing rules in Drools and is looking for insights into a lot of the product. (For instance, if you're used to only writing rules, you might not be familiar with the Complex Event Processing mechanisms.) The book gets a little ambitious with the application it uses to showcase Drools, but it does cover a lot of what you can do. I regret there wasn't much coverage given to Guvnor, the Business Rules Management System. All things considered, I'd call this a reasonable book of best practices on a topic that's currently sparsely written about. If you're in the Drools workspace, you ought to have a look at it.

This book from Packt Publishing is the best one I have run across in 2009. Often they are a bit off the mark on order, cohesion and readability, but this one is spot on for business rules developers.

I think that this will become the bible for JBoss BRMS developers as it covers all the details you need to get your projects rolling.

After a very short introduction (as it should be, we are developers and want to get started), this book dives into the basic rules syntax and validation. You are then walked through the process of how to load facts into a knowledge session which is all about data transformation.

When dealing with rules we often have to make sure that the business users are not left out in the cold. The author take a good look at Domain Specific Language (DSL) implementation in Drools, decision tables and dealing with Drools Flow. These are all supported with examples and code to feed the developer learning how to make use of these elements of a rules implementation.

A walk through stateful sessions is followed by Complex Event Processing (CEP) with Drools Fusion and supported with a fraud detection example. This is really interesting and feeds me at the technical depth I expect from a developers guide.

There is an entire chapter spent on the details within Drools Flow and this is followed up with a sample application to walk you through all the details of setting up and executing a rules project. Testing is touched on briefly, along with some integration topics (Spring and the JSR94 standard). Finally, the book finishes up with a look at performance, providing you with insights to help you optimize your rules projects.

This book is well written, contains good technical depth and is very thorough. There is not much left for you to look for on JBoss with regards to your rules projects. You need this book on your development shelf if you are working with JBoss and rules in your organization.