ofbiz has, though not implemented well, a rules engine as well as a
workeffort and event(ECA, SECA, controller events) Model. the Project
management also lends itself to rules.
I would suggest we work out a model rules engine that works around the
way ofbiz works. That was the short comings of the other rules engines
was the integration into the ofbiz model.
Maybe doing a review of rule engines in ofbiz now and why they did not
get implemented would be a good exercise.
My efforts have been how to have a ui that a business person would
understand, and generate ECA and SECA to accomplish Thier logic. The top
level of this would be when they generate a business plan, it sets up
the rules on how the business flow is done. This actually is base on
compiler theory and some program that create web code for a particular
type of web. I estimated to be about 1.5 man year.
Sam Hamilton sent the following on 7/28/2010 8:12 PM:
Hi Guys,
I have been thinking about problems we are soon going to start facing in
marketing our OFBiz website and some of them can be solved using a rules
engine, this then spilled over into other departments once I had read through
the Drools website and saw how powerful it could be once implemented inside
OFBiz.
I was thinking Drools http://jboss.org/drools/ as its ASL2 so we can have in
trunk http://jboss.org/drools/downloads.html and also because of the GUI which
could be plugged into OFBiz where ever we need rules - a few cool examples are
here
http://downloads.jboss.com/drools/docs/5.0.1.26597.FINAL/drools-introduction/html/ch02.html#d0e166
and for the developers or data mining people using Birt etc they can use
Eclipse.
The uses I can think of right now are:
1. Sending emails to customers - similar to auto responders or triggered emails
.
2. Stock reordering - allowing different stock to be treated differently
depending on for example how fast its selling or out of which warehouse the
most is shipped.
3. Inserting marketing material into parcels - picking different customer
segments and targeting them differently.
4. Shipping carrier upgrades / changes depending on either destination or price
- like zappos do when they secretly upgrade customers to over night delivery.
5. Refunds to customers if something goes wrong (could automate some of the
process) and then if its outside the rules it move to a human for review.
The real aim is that I want to move the process of rule changing out of the
programers hands and put them into technical business people so that we can
make fast changes to the business all done by the business users.
What does everyone else think?
Cheers
Sam
