Introduction to Drools 7 for Developers

Programming skills in any language strongly recommended (SQL, Java, C#, VBA, etc...)

This 3 days course is aimed to introduce Drools 7 to developers.This course doesn't cover drools integration, performance or any other complex topics.

Short introduction to rule engines

1. Short history or Expert Systems and Rules Engine
2. What is Artificial Intelligence?
3. Forward vs Backward chaining
4. Declarative vs procedure/oop
5. Comparison of solutions
6. When to use rule engines?
7. When not to use rule engines?
8. Alternatives to rule engines

KIE

1. Authoring Assets
2. Workbench Integration
   • Executing rules directly from KIE
   • Deployment
3. Decision tables
4. Rule Templates
5. Guided rule editor
6. Testing
7. Work Items
8. Versioning and deployment
9. A bit more about repository (git)
10. Developing simple process with rules

Writing rules in Eclipse

1. Stateless vs Stateful sessions
2. Selecting proper facts
   • Basic operators and Drools specific operators)
   • Basic accumulate functions (sum, max, etc...)
   • ​Intermediate calculations
3. Inserting new facts
4. Exercises (lots of them)
5. Ordering rules with BPMN
   • Salience
   • Ruleflow vs BPMN 2.0
   • Executing ruleset from a process
   • Rules vs gateways
   • Short overview of BPMN 2.0 features (transactions, exception handling)
   • Comprehensive declarative business logic in Drools
6. Domain Specific Languages (DSL)
   • Creating new languages
   • Preparing DSL to be used by manages
   • Basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) with DSL
7. Fusion (CPE), temporal reasoning (for events to happen after, between, etc...)
   • Fusion operators
   • Example in Event Schedules
8. Unit testing

Optional Topics

1. OptaPlanner
2. jBPM
3. Drools and integration via web services
4. Drools integration via command line
5. How to change rules/process after deployment without compiling