Advantages of a Rule Engine
Following are some of the major advantages of a Rule Engine.
Easier to understand
Rules are easier to understand for a business analyst or a new developer than a program written in Java or other imperative-style language.
Improved maintainability
Since rules are easier to understand, a developer can spend more time solving the actual problem.
Dealing with evolving complexity
It is much easier to add new, modify, or remove existing rules than to change, for example, a
Java program. The impact this has on other rules is minimal in comparison with an imperative-style implementation.Flexibility:
It deals better with changes to the requirements or changes to the data model. Changing or rewriting an application is never an easy task. However, thanks to the formalism that rules bring, it is much easier to change rules than to change a
Java program.Reasonable performance
Thanks to the Rete algorithm that is behind Drools; in theory, the performance of the system doesn't depend on the number of rules. With every release of Drools, the performance of the engine is getting better by adding various optimizations such as Rete node sharing, node indexing, parallel execution, and so on. All this benefits new as well as old rules.
Translating requirements into rules
The representation of business rules is consistent. For example, let's take some business rule and implement it in
Java. Developers, depending on their experience, tend to use different ways to solve a problem. We'll find out that the possible solutions will vary greatly. Whereas with rules, this diversification becomes less apparent. It is simply because we are expressing "what" instead of "how". As a result the code is much easier to read even by new developers.Ability to apply enterprise management to our rules
This builds on the previous advantage of consistent representation. If we have consistent representation, it is much easier to introduce new features that apply across all our rules (for example, auditing, logging, reporting, or performance optimizations)
Reusability:
The rules are kept in one place (separation of business logic from the rest of the system), which means easier reusability. For example, imagine you've written some validation rules for your application and later on there is a need to do some batch imports of data, so you could simply reuse the validation rules in your batch import application.
Modeling the application closely
Rules model the application invariants more closely. The imperative-style solutions tend to impose arbitrary and often unnecessary ordering on operations, depending on the algorithm chosen. This then hides the original invariants of the application.
Unifying
The Drools platform brings unification of rules and processes. It is easy to call rules from a process or vice versa.
Redeploying
It is possible to change/redeploy rules and processes without even stopping the whole application.
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