Rules and Drools Rundown

It’s been a good few weeks for stories and information about JBoss Rules and Drools, the open source project upstream of the JBoss subscription offering. Here is a quick summary of the recent stories. Post a comment if you know of any others we all should pay attention to.

• Pierre Fricke, JBoss product manager, writes about Daiwa Securities America Improves Performance and Reduces Costs with JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. The Red Hat press release says, “In addition to the (JBoss) Portal Platform, Daiwa also uses the JBoss Rules framework to embed alerts into portal applications.”
• Two articles on Drools were published in Red Hat Magazine, Introduction to Drools: Rules fall from your eyes and JBoss Drools meets Hibernate. Both pieces are a good introduction to working with Drools.
• Drools continues to grow its library of widgets for the Guv’nor, which is the web tool and rules repository of Drools, formerly known just as the “Drools BRMS.” This new widget, rolodex, adds a flipping slideshow of photos pulled using Google Web Toolkit.
• A beta implementation of WordNet for Drools is being talked up by project lead Mark Proctor; they are seeking comments from users/testers in the Drools mailing list.
• Mark Proctor also writes, “We often get asked about Drools scalability in complex apps, so I thought I would link to this posting just done, where someone has Drools scaling to 900K facts on a 64bit JVM with reasonable performance.”
• More tools and features are being included in Drools all the time, such as adding Smooks as a data loader.