Introduction to Drools 6 for Developers

• Programming skills in any language (e.g., SQL, Java, C#, VBA)

Audience

• Software developers
• System architects
• Technical decision makers evaluating rule engines

Drools 6 is a powerful open-source business rule management system (BRMS) that helps developers manage complex business logic in a declarative way.

This instructor-led, live training (online or onsite) is aimed at intermediate-level developers who wish to get a solid introduction to Drools 6 and use it to implement business rules within their applications.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Understand the core concepts and benefits of rule engines like Drools.
• Use the Drools Workbench and Eclipse for rule authoring and testing.
• Create, organize, and execute business rules with the Drools rule engine.
• Apply advanced features like decision tables, ruleflows, and DSLs.

Format of the Course

• Interactive lecture and discussion.
• Lots of exercises and practice.
• Hands-on implementation in a live-lab environment.

Course Customization Options

• To request a customized training for this course, please contact us to arrange.

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