What is a Rules Engine

The rules engine is a software that helps you to separate business logic (rules) from the hard code. In an ideal situation, rules can be changed by a person other than a software developer, and what is more, it can be done without a need to restart the application.

A business rules engine is an environment that executes rules against provided business data. The result of this execution is a decision.

Rules can be prepared as decision tables or as functions. Parameters are more preferred because of its easy to understand and create by non-developers.

Read more about: Business Rules Engine and Business Rules Management System

Examples of business rules (decisions)

• price of insurance
• score value for banking customer
• availability of a product for the customer
• recommended product for the customer
• field validation

So you can see that weight of decisions can be very different from the simplest one to very complex based on may decision tables and input data.

Main benefits of the rules engine

The main benefit of having a rules engine is a very short time to market. With the correct deployment business, people can change software behavior in matters of minutes. Without a rules engine, it can take from days with the very agile team and process to months on a big organization with rigid release plans.

Another benefit of ease of changing your mind is an invitation for business people to experiment with different business settings. To quickly validate a business idea in the real world and drop it if results are not as good as expected.

Other rules engines

There are other rules engines on the market as:

• Drools
• Camunda
• jBPM
• Flexrule

Higson stands out with hyper speed, versioning, user interface, and configuration organization in a clear object tree that is easy to maintain.

I invite you to make your evaluation by downloading Higson and going thru the first tutorial