Re: Drools and CAM

["David Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Mark,

Your PPT is a great introduction to the world of rule engines and methods.

My own background is heavily Prolog - for 15 years.  I missed seeing
constraint based solutioning - but I guess DROOLS has to leave somethings to
those old purpose built engines!  And besides DROOLS could always
collaborate with a Prolog engine as a close cousin.... ; -)

On to CAM and DROOLS.  I have some PPT slides I will share during the week
once I've cleaned them up for external perusal.

Basically the notion is to use the mechanisms in CAM - that is essentially a
domain expert agent in XML structures and metadata - and provide an
interface directly in CAM to DROOLS and back again.  Then we're adding the
ability to persist to SQL databases in CAM directly from the XML source -
using simple XML syntax based assignment instructions.

This should allow people who are not DROOLS experts - to create a
business-centric solution that quickly handles basic ebusiness
transactions - while allowing extended rules to be layered into this - by
software staff - that handle decreet rules and tests that are beyond the
scope of the base CAM function set.

This gives people the best of both worlds - a purpose built business XML
expert agent - coupled to the extensible DROOLS engine.

Your snippet of DROOLS V3 shows that this is all heading in the right
direction.

We've been experimenting with:
 <as:includeScript location="{url/my.drl}"/>
and
<as:executeScript name="{name.drl}" parm="\\xpath\locator\*"/>

as a first pass to provide linkage between the two.

I am definately interested in discussing this with the DROOLS community -
where CAM can provide a pluggable XML handler toolkit for DROOLS users?

Beyond all this - DROOLS also looks like a good means to implement a state
machine for BPSS (and JBOSS driven BPM) as envisioned in our BCM
architecture work - but we'll solve one problem at a time here!

I'm a bit allergic to signing up for IRC lists - my daily bandwidth is
severally constrained already - but we can definately look at sharing some
collaboration resources - possibly a wiki area - where ideas and test
components can be posted..?

Thanks, DW

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Proctor" <mproctor@codehaus.org>
To: <david@drrw.info>; <TANVEER_ASHIQUE@bah.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2006 2:24 PM
Subject: Drools and CAM


> David, Tanveer,
>
> GoogleAlert brought your postings to my attention. We have big plans for
> Drools 3.0, which will be available at the end of Q1 - see the slides at
>
http://drools.org/download/attachments/20545/Business+Rules+Engines.ppt?version=1
> for more details.
>
> In the mean time if there is anything more we can do to assist or you
> just want a general chat, we are always on the irc server #drools at
> irc.codehaus.org - we provide a web gateway at http://irc.codehaus.org
> if you do not want to install an IRC client.
>
> Mark
>