Hi guys I am new to the Rules-engine world and am now faced with developing a system which will allow "several companies" (our target 100+ companies in the Courier-business) to set up "several different products each" basically selling their services via us(Supply & demand scenario). We would like to allow the companies to configure their products themselves. This involves setting up Variables, Rates, Additional services, Surcharges, the Areas they servic etc. which at the moment I have modelled into a relational-database model.
After the user enters his/her request for service a product goes through several phases to determine whether it matches the client's request and to calculate the rate Using straight SQL to do all this is very ineffecient and I am sure this will be very slow when we finally go into production because if we support 100 companies and each of them have approx. 5 different products.....well that is 500 different scenarios that we will then have to evaluate against. So my choices are to build my own framework and attempt to run this whole thing from memory(No accessing any external repository) OR look at what engines like Drools or Jess can do for me. Since I am absolutely new to Rules-engine I would like to pose some questions which are bugging me. 1. Will a Rules-engine(Drools) be the right choice for such a project? 2. Since there can be potentially 500+ products (with all of them having different Variables, Rates etc.), will there then be 500+ different RuleSets? What kind of impact will this have on memory requirements? 3. Do the conditions in the Drools XML-RuleSets allow OR conditions? I seem to miss any use of Operands (AND, OR, NOT) in the conditions. I would really appreciate any pointers in this regard. PS. reading material, examples, previous experience would be helpfull Thanx --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.361 / Virus Database: 199 - Release Date: 2002/05/07 _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas - http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm?source=osdntextlink _______________________________________________ drools-interest mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/drools-interest
