I tested JRules 4.5 on three Intel-based Windows machines and on a Power Mac G4 running Mac OS X, which is a variant of FreeBSD Unix. The Windows systems included Windows XP Pro running on a 1.8MHz CPU with 768MB of RAM; Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 2 installed) on a 1GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM; and Windows NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 6 installed) on an old Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. On all of the machines JRules ran well using either JDK 1.3.1_07 or JDK 1.4.2 but I had to be careful not to use the “assert” keyword when using JDK 1.3.1_07 since it is reserved by JDK 1.4.2 but not by JDK 1.3.1_07.In addition to comparing JRules 4.5 performance against JRules 4.0 using the Miss Manners and Waltz benchmarks, I also tested the ability of JRules 4.5 to run within a distributed J2EE environment using the JBoss Web application server, the Apache Tomcat servlet container, the WinCVS (Concurrent Versions System) version control system, and the Apache Ant build tool. Unfortunately, JBoss is not one of the EJB deployment tools supported by JRules 4.5. Although deployment on JBoss was difficult, it was ultimately successful. Tech support at ILOG sent me some files to work with JBoss, and a JBoss guru helped me with the rest. ILOG indicated that future versions of JRules will include the JBoss extensions. Software Development