Chapter 2. JBoss BRMS And JBoss BPM Suite Architecture

2.1. JBoss Business Rules Management System

Red Hat JBoss BRMS is an open source business rule management system that provides rules development, access, change, and management capabilities. In today's world, when IT organizations consistently face changes in terms of policies, new products, government imposed regulations, a system like JBoss BRMS makes it easy by separating business logic from the underlying code. It includes a rule engine, a rules development environment, a management system, and a repository. It allows both developers and business analysts to view, manage, and verify business rules as they are executed within an IT application infrastructure.
JBoss BRMS can be executed in any Java EE-compliant container. It supports an open choice of authoring and management consoles and language and decision table inputs.

2.1.1. JBoss BRMS Key Components

JBoss BRMS comprises the following components:
  • Drools Expert
    Drools Expert is a pattern matching based rule engine that runs on Java EE application servers, JBoss BRMS platform, or bundled with Java applications. It comprises an inference engine, a production memory , and a working memory. Rules are stored in the production memory and the facts that the inference engine matches the rules against, are stored in the working memory.
  • Business Central
    Business Central is a web interface intended for business analysts for creation and maintenance of business rules and rule artifacts. It is designed to ease creation, testing, and packaging of rules for business users.
  • Drools Flow
    Drools flow provides business process capabilities to the JBoss BRMS platform. This framework can be embedded into any Java application or can even run standalone on a server. A business process provides stepwise tasks using a flow chart, for the Rule Engine to execute.
  • Drools Fusion
    Drools Fusion provides event processing capabilities to the JBoss BRMS platform. Drools Fusion defines a set of goals to be achieved such as:
    • Support events as first class citizens.
    • Support detection, correlation, aggregation and composition of events.
    • Support processing streams of events.
    • Support temporal constraints in order to model the temporal relationships between events.
  • Drools Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
    We encourage you to use Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) with JBoss BRMS plug-ins to develop and test business rules. The JBoss Developer Studio builds upon an extensible, open source Java-based IDE Eclipse providing platform and framework capabilities, making it ideal for JBoss BRMS rules development.

2.1.2. JBoss BRMS Features

The JBoss BRMS provides the following key features:
  • Centralized repository of business assets (JBoss BRMS artifacts)
  • IDE tools to define and govern decision logic
  • Building, deploying, and testing the decision logic
  • Packages of business assets
  • Categorization of business assets
  • Integration with development tools
  • Business logic and data separation
  • Business logic open to reuse and changes
  • Easy to maintain business logic
  • Enables several stakeholders (business analysts, developer, administrators) to contribute in defining the business logic