Ajit Sagar

This session will provide guidelines, best practices, and a methodology to design and implement Business Rules Engine based projects to service-enable your enterprise. The implementation areas will apply to large enterprise applications with multiple dependencies. Parallels between different applications of BREs in typical scenarios will be covered and the leading vendor offerings in the market including iLog, Blaze, Savvion, Mindbox, JRules, will be examined. Multiple aspects of rules-based design and development will be covered including - vendor evaluation, conducting an appropriate proof of concept, putting together the appropriate team, creating a business rules, center of excellence, and rules design, development, and maintenance. Business rules standards including JSR-94 will be covered in this session, as well as the stratum occupied by BREs in an SOA.

The session will benefit senior developers, technical architects, team leads, IT managers, and others interested in learning about how to achieve success in large scale business rules based projects. After attending this session, you will be able to address the challenges of BRE-based development with confidence and with a structured approach.

The business rules paradigm is very different from traditional development. It requires a different way of approaching the problem, and there are substantial organizational as well as technical changes that need to take place in an organization before it can successfully adopt business rules in their enterprise applications. The challenges and how to address them in a feasible manner will be addressed in this session. The application of BREs to move towards SOA in an agile organization will be covered.

BREs do not stand on their own. They occupy a specific echelon to fulfill a specific need in a service oriented architecture. One of the overlaps commonly seen is between workflow engines and BREs. Because of the confusion caused by overlapping features offered by both types of vendors, sometimes the wrong technology is used to solve a problem. This session will clearly call out the relationship between BREs and other paradigms such as workflow, as well as standards such as JBI.

The concepts presented in this presentation will be illustrated through case studies addressing the application of Business Rules Engines in large enterprises.