I'm working on a non-ofbiz project right now where they are considering replacing the commercial rules engine solution with something like drools. Drools looks like a solid rules engine. They have their own domain specific language (DSL) which makes the rules easy to develop and follow. The also handled nested rules very effectively.
I like ECA and SECA as well but I have used them more like database triggers and not a method for implementing complicated rules and workflow, but I could be wrong on this subject. Drools appears to be licensed appropriately for ofbiz. I would be in favor of drools rules engine integration implementation. Brett On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 9:47 PM, BJ Freeman <[email protected]> wrote: > 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#d0e166and >> 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 >> >> >>
