Preview: JRules 6.5 steers into SOA

As SOA continues to gain momentum, integration of business decision logic into service architectures becomes increasingly important. ILOG JRules version 6.5 smooths the way with a wizard-based deployment mechanism, called Transparent Decision Services, that gives technical business analysts the ability to develop and deploy SOAP-based business rule services without working with code. Other refinements in version 6.5 include a Semantic Query feature and an upgrade to Eclipse 3.2 for the Rule Studio.

With the recent focus on SOA and event-driven architectures in the enterprise, business rule analysts will appreciate the ability to deploy decision logic as enterprise services using the Rule Studio and Execution Server components of the JRules 6.5 stack — no Java compilation steps required. Although the initial setup and deployment of the rules does require an analyst with some technical knowledge of Rule Studio and Execution Server, once setup is completed business users can manage the rules without technical assistance.

Transparent Decision Services only works with Business Object Models (BOMs) defined in XML, but since most SOAs pass XML data in and out of services anyway, this is not a significant limitation. Overall, Transparent Decision Services simplifies and streamlines the management of business rules within an SOA. It’s a move in the right direction.

The new Semantic Query feature is an extension of the query tools introduced in version 6.0. These constructs allow you to query for rules based on the possible run-time conditions, as opposed to static rule conditions. An example of the new type of query this permits might be, “Find all rules such that each rule may lead to an application rejection.” This makes it easier for a policy analyst to identify the rules of interest, since they may be located by action (or condition) values. This version also includes hooks for custom extensions of queries using Java.

With this release JRules takes a first step forward into the SOA space and enables decision services to be rapidly updated by business analysts. That alone makes the upgrade worthwhile for enterprises implementing SOA. On the downside, the documentation is still sorely in need of improvement. The user manual, now weighing in at 3,456 pages, is available in HTML and PDF, but neither of these formats is very good for working with such a large document set. I miss the Windows Help version of the documentation from JRules 5. It had a great search tool, extensive hyperlinks, and the docs were a lot easier to use.