Intelligent business rules management

Today’s business applications increasingly need to operate dynamically – responding to changing conditions, processing huge amounts of data and making decisions automatically, without human intervention. The key to achieving such flexibility is to separate the business logic from the application code.
Drools is an open source platform that enables business rules to be defined and managed in a transparent and scalable way – supporting decision automation across business domains.

What is Drools?

Drools is an advanced business rules engine (BRMS – Business Rules Management System), written in Java, that allows rules to be defined and executed in a declarative way. It enables the decoupling of decision-making logic from the application code, allowing for easier management of complex business dependencies and faster response to change.
Drools is part of the KIE (Knowledge Is Everything) ecosystem and is the foundation for solutions such as Kogito and jBPM.

Key functions

• Rule Engine – Uses an inference mechanism (the so-called RETE algorithm) that allows even very complex rules to be processed efficiently.

• Drools Rule Language (DRL) – A specialised declarative language for writing rules – readable by developers and business analysts.

• Rule Management – Ability to group, version and modularise rules across projects and environments.

• Support for Temporal Rules – Ability to take time into account in logic – e.g. detection of a sequence of events within a specific time window.

• Data and event integration (CEP – Complex Event Processing) – Handling data streams and events in real time – enables dynamic responses to changes in the business environment.

• Connection to DMN and BPMN – Drools supports decision modelling (DMN) and integration with processes (jBPM, Kogito), enabling end-to-end automation of activities.

Advantages of using Drools

• Flexibility and scalability – rules can be changed without recompiling the application
• Open source code – no commercial licences, large community and continuous development
• Fast implementation of changes – business logic can be updated without modifying the entire application
• Understandability of rules – rules are written in a readable form, which allows them to be reviewed and edited also by non-technical persons
• High performance – an optimised inference algorithm enables fast rule processing even with a large number of data and conditions
• Integration with other tools – interoperability with Kogito, jBPM, Spring Boot, Quarkus, Kafka and other environments