Chapter 3. Available installation platforms

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (Red Hat JBoss EAP) 7.1 is a certified implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) full and web profile specifications. Red Hat JBoss EAP provides preconfigured options for features such as high availability, clustering, messaging, and distributed caching. It also enables users to write, deploy, and run applications using the various APIs and services that Red Hat JBoss EAP provides.

You can install both Decision Central and Decision Server in a single Red Hat JBoss EAP instance. However, in production environments you should install them in separate instances.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OpenShift) brings together Docker and Kubernetes, and provides an API to manage these services. OpenShift Container Platform enables you to create and manage containers.

In this solution, components of Red Hat Decision Manager are deployed as separate OpenShift pods. You can scale each of the pods up and down individually, providing as few or as many containers as necessary for a particular component. You can use standard OpenShift methods to manage the pods and balance the load.

You can install both Decision Central and Decision Server on OpenShift.

Oracle WebLogic Server is a Java EE application server that provides a standard set of APIs for creating distributed Java applications that can access a wide variety of services, such as databases, messaging services, and connections to external enterprise systems. Users access these applications using web browser clients or Java clients.

You can install Decision Server in an Oracle Weblogic Server instance and then use the headless Decision Manager controller and the REST API or the Decision Server Java Client API to interact with Decision Server. You can also use standalone Decision Central to interact with Decision Server.

IBM WebSphere Application Server is a flexible and secure web application server that hosts Java-based web applications and provides Java EE-certified run time environments. IBM WebSphere 9.0 supports Java SE 8 and is fully compliant with Java EE 7 since version 8.5.5.6.

You can install Decision Server in an IBM WebSphere Application Server instance and then use the headless Decision Manager controller to interact with Decision Server. You can also use standalone Decision Central to interact with Decision Server.

Developers can develop assets in Red Hat Decision Manager. However, you can optionally integrate Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio with Red Hat Process Automation Manager to enable developers to write complex applications and leverage code auto-completion.

Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) based on Eclipse. It integrates tooling and runtime components by combining Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling, and Red Hat JBoss EAP. Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio provides plug-ins with tools and interfaces for Red Hat Decision Manager. These plug-ins are based on the community version of these products. For this reason, the Red Hat Decision Manager plug-in is called the Drools plug-in.