Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Recent Thoughts on Rules Engines
It has been almost one year since I last posted on Business Rules Engines and figured I would share perspectives on a recent rules engine I ran across...
Bet you didn't know that Ruby on Rails has its own Rules Engine. It doesn't seem to use the RETE algorithm, do any form of inferencing or chaining but it is declarative. Maybe someone from the Rules community could blog their own perspectives on this rules engine?
This does of course stimulate additional questions that I would love to know the answers to including, but not limited to:
| | View blog reactionsBet you didn't know that Ruby on Rails has its own Rules Engine. It doesn't seem to use the RETE algorithm, do any form of inferencing or chaining but it is declarative. Maybe someone from the Rules community could blog their own perspectives on this rules engine?
This does of course stimulate additional questions that I would love to know the answers to including, but not limited to:
- Are rules engine vendors doing themselves a disservice by only targeting Java and/or .NET?
- Where can I find the litmus test to tell if this is truly a rules engine or should be labelled as something else?
- Does anyone know of a Rules engine for Smalltalk that implements RETE? or should we continue to think of Smalltalk as a second-class citizen in this regard?
- How come folks such as James Taylor, Brad Appleton, William McKnight or Sandy Kemsley haven't ever compared/constrasted development done via declarative rules-based approaches vs. modern configuration-oriented approaches such as Ruby on Rails?
- Rules engines in most products are for the most part single threaded. When will Rules engines become useful in grid computing applications?
- When can we expect Barbara Von Halle to start talking about Rules from an architecture perspective vs project management perspective and actually blogging it?
