Research And Implementation Of MIS Based On Business Rule Approach

As representation of the supervisor's decisions or relevant policies, the business logic of a management information system (MIS) might change rapidly. If traditional software development method is taken, to deal with these changes, we have to re-code part of the application system, and this leads to high costs on the maintenance of the software, which becomes more and more unacceptable. New solutions are needed eagerly.In order to satisfy the increasingly high requirements of the flexibility of modern information system, people have made a lot of contributions, either from the aspect of the optimizing architects of the software, or from the aspect of developing new software development method. In all of them, rule-based software development method can achieve the motives of separating business logic from the application system and completing the changes of business logic rapidly, through expressing the original business logic of the system in the form of business rules instead of coding them directly in the software.In this paper, we considered carefully of the impacts of software architects and development methods on the extensibility and maintainability of the software in the process of building a specific management information system, and as a result, we designed a business rule-based architecture for the system, and implemented it successfully. This MIS is built on the platform of J2EE, and we achieve the motive of separating the business logic and application components by introducing a business rule component. The business logic of the system is encapsulated into a group of so-called rule packages, which are depended on by the business rule component and maintained as resource data, instead of program code. The changes of business logic can be done by easily changing the data-formed rule packages, but make no impact on the application.The design of the business rule component is the key of the system. When we implement this component, we use the JBoss Rules to act as the business rule inference engine. A business rule service module is designed to accomplish the communications of the business rule component with application components. A business rule maintenance module is designed to accomplish the maintenance and administration of the business rule packages. Facts have proved that the system we designed behaves well in the aspects of usability, ease to operate and ability to deal with rapid-change business logic.