Donald, If your requirement is to involve non-programmers and to capture their expertise in a way that is intuitive for them, you may want to look at the knowledge engine offered by Discovery Machine (www.discoverymachine.com) whose products are targeted at exactly this use case. They offer a graphical IDE for modeling the process that an expert/non-programmer uses to solve problems. It is process-oriented, not rule-oriented, but there could be a translation into a set of Jess rules or Jess rules could be fired by or trigger the process models. The engine is 100% Java and the output can be serialized into a standalone mode or output as XML.
Caveat: I am a former employee but I do not receive any financial gain from the use of their product. You can contact the CTO Todd Griffith at [email protected]. Regards, Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Donald Winston Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 9:43 AM To: Jess-users Subject: JESS: Rule Translators? What's the possibility of some sort of rule "translator" for Jess. One of the reasons for using a rule engine in a typical business app is to separate the business rules from the rest of the application so non programmers can work with the rules. (Although in my experience we end up with programmers developing the rules anyway) I think it's going to be difficult to convince my clients to let me use Jess if this is a priority for them. I believe most will be put off by the Lisp language that Jess uses. Even if software engineers will be writing the rules from some sort of documentation they might not like it. I know there's a RuleML effort. But to be really good the translation would have to go both from ML -> Lisp and Lisp -> ML. In addition the rules developer would not be editing the ML directly but an english like language to express the rules. This would probably put a straight jacket on how Jess is used in these kinds of apps(which may be a good thing). (I've decided I like Jess especially because these days Blaze Advisor costs six figures! Drools is a frigging elephant) I'm going to use it for a prototype app I've had in mind. -------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [email protected]' in the BODY of a message to [email protected], NOT to the list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [email protected]. -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [email protected]' in the BODY of a message to [email protected], NOT to the list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [email protected]. --------------------------------------------------------------------
