Research On The Application Of Rule Engine In The Distributed Conditions

Today's business markets are changing frequently. In order to always remain competitive, modern enterprises necessarily need their applications to keep up with market changes and make response quickly. Compared to the traditional methodology which hard-coding business logic into applications, the rule engine based development methodology can separate the business logic from the implementation logic. In this new architecture, business rules can be set up, modified or deleted without recompiling and deploying the applications. So it greatly enhances the response speed of enterprises. Several industrial domains are highly distributed. This organizational structure is also reflected in their applications. In recent years, service-oriented architecture has attracted more and more interest and it can provide strong support for distributed applications to achieve loose coupling and enhance reusability. Therefore, combining business rules with a service-oriented architecture can help to develop more flexible and adaptive enterprise applications. However, most of the current rule engines are lack of remote invocation interfaces, so they can't be integrated effectively in the distributed conditions.In this paper, we start from the actual situation, combine the existing specification with technology, and research on the application of rule engine in the distributed conditions. Based on Java Specification Request (JSR) 94 specification, through combing with Web services technology, we implement a rule engine integration platform. This integration platform breaks through the restriction that traditional rule engine can only be used in local applications. So it extends the application range of rule engine and also achieves the reusability of business rules. In this paper, we also research on distributed rule execution and implement a prototype of distributed rule engine based on our rule engine integration platform. If several distributed rule engines are used together, they will create a distributed network of rule engines. The distributed rule engine has the ability to execute distributed business rules and extends the range of rule inference.In this paper we complete the following works:①We analyze the research background and significance, discuss the research status at home and board, and make clear the problems that current rule engines can not be effectively applied in the distributed conditions. In order to solve these problems, we propose our research objectives that we should set up a rule engine integration platform and implement a prototype of distributed rule engine based on our integration platform.②We present related technologies about rule engine, and based on these technologies we design and implement a rule engine integration platform. The integration platform is based on JSR94 specification and combined with Web services technology. The integration platform is made up of 3 parts which are JSR94 client, JSR94 server and rule service toolkit. Through using this platform, we can easily invoke remote rule engines and achieve an effective reuse of business rules.③Based on rule engine integration platform and open source rule engine Drools, we analyze the distributed rule engine and implement a prototype system.