Customer Reviews

JBoss Drools Business Rules

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this book early in 2009 when I was diving deeper into the JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) and found it to be a good overview.

It is light on the technical depth, but this is not a problem and all crucial parts of the system are covered. It appeals to both business types and technical types trying to get a grasp of the Drools project components.

The book begins with a good introduction to rules and business rules in an organization, provides help with setting up your Drools environment and provides a tour of the following components in your business rules infrastructure:

* Guvnor, the guided rule editor

* JBoss IDE, the developers rule editing environment

* Testing your rules

* Managing your rules from Excel

* Domain Specific Languages (DSL)

* RuleFlow, graphical rule design

Furthermore, the book takes you through deploying rules in a real life situation and details how the rule engine works all the way down to the RETE algorithm.

This book is a very good place to start your JBoss Business Rules experience, whether you have done rules development before or not. It will get you up to speed on rules, is easy to read, well structured and before you know it you will be designing your first rules package.

This book is certainly a useful introduction and explains in detail everything you need to install to get up and running. If you have a technical phobia or don't want information on how to install software, don't read the book. Having said that, it suited what I wanted well. It is difficult to obtain all this information from other sources, so I congratulate the author.

If you are instead looking for a discussion on requirements gathering, rule writing concepts, good practices and implementation aspects, other books would be more appropriate.

I knew nothing about Drools & this book was only helpful for the overview. The library/api seem to be out of date with latest Drools release. I had problems running the code which was really frustrating for some one who is trying to learn through the code. I gave up on their code examples & had more luck with googling code samples.

I would have given this book a 1 star if it wasn't the fact it is only one of the very few books on Drools available.