Intelligent Enterprise

Business rules show up in a lot of applications. Call centers employ rules for routing, exception-handling, escalation and approvals. Financial services set up transactional and administrative rules based on deal value, customer status and regulatory scrutiny. Security software embeds access security rules. And as always, rules are made to be broken, so software developers ideally want something that business users can change without having to go to IT to alter code.

Counting on demand among software developers, integrators and corporate application developers who don't want to reinvent the wheel, rules technology provider Corticon has released the Business Rules Management Foundation, a platform for embedding rules management capabilities into any enterprise application. The platform includes a model-driven design environment, repository and rules engine, and developers can expose as much or as little development, editing and management functionality as necessary for the application.

Most importantly, rule writing, editing and management capabilities can be exposed directly within applications, so users won't have to learn and use to a separate rules application. The platform supports multiple user-interface frameworks and metaphors, and Corticon provides an SDK with business rules modeling and repository APIs, associated Java docs, design documents and prototype client code for partners and customers to use as design patterns. Corticon Foundation was release late last month.