Intelligent Enterprise

Reusability is a key to successful services-oriented architecture deployments, but there are three requirements when attempting to find and reuse services. First, service owners must be able to know and inspect the policies inside each service he or she maintains. Second, service users must be able to discover services and understand just what they do in business terms. Finally, service developers need to respond quickly to change requests.

ILog says the 6.5 upgrade of its JRules business rules management system (BRMS) delivers on all three requirements for reuse of "decision services," ILog's term for the business rules composed and delivered as Web services. The upgrade lets service owners pull up reports on all rules, decision trees and decision tables implemented as decision services. Service users can access the same reports, and they also have access to the WSDL (Web Service Description Language) files and can see details on inputs and outputs. To speed deployment and improve productivity, JRules 6.5 automates the generation, wrapping and registering of WSDL files in "push button" fashion, so service developers can focus on creating new rules and responding to policy change requests.

A new semantic query feature in JRules 6.5 lets all levels of users look for rules based on their expected behavior so they can quickly find and understand existing rule services. For example, a business analyst at an insurance company could run a query looking for all rules that may apply when "State equals New Jersey" or "car type equals SUV." This feature speeds and simplifies impact analysis when policy changes are required. JRules 6.5 was announced and released on February 13.