JBoss Rules has a native rule language. This format is very light in terms of punctuation, and supports natural and domain specific languages via "expanders" that allow the language to morph to your problem domain.

A rule file is typically a file with a .drl extension. In a DRL file you can have multiple rules, queries and functions, as well as some resource declarations like imports, globals, and attributes that are assigned and used by your rules and queries. However, you are also able to spread your rules across multiple rule files (in that case, the extension .rule is suggested, but not required) - spreading rules across files can help with managing large numbers of rules. A DRL file is simply a text file.

The overall structure of a rule file is the following:

package package-name

imports

globals

functions

queries

rules

The order in which the elements are declared is not important, except for the package name that, if declared, must be the first element in the rules file. All elements are optional, so you will use only those you need.

For the inpatients, just as an early view, a rule has the following rough structure:

rule "name"
    attributes
    when
        LHS
    then
        RHS
end

Mostly punctuation is not needed, even the double quotes for "name" are optional, as are newlines. Attributes are simple (always optional) hints to how the rule should behave. LHS is the conditional parts of the rule, which follows a certain syntax which is covered below. RHS is basically a block that allows dialect specific semantic code to be executed.

It is important to note that white space is not important, except in the case of domain specific languages, where lines are processed one by one and spaces may be significant to the domain language.