Top 10 Java Business Rule Engines

Business around the world undergo dynamic changes contingent to market economics. Industries like banking and insurance are most vulnerable stooges of market changes and need to develop plans to deal with such exigencies. The business rule engines have emerged as solution for such anomalies generating a set of tools that allow the business analysts and developers to build decision logic based on an organization’s data. Basically, a business rule is considered as a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. These rules are used to control or influence the business’s behavior. Generally the rule engines evaluates and executes the rules with if-then statements. This allows the separation of knowledge from its implementation logic and can be modified without changing source code.

These Java business rule engines are software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. The Java rule engine has been developed through the Java Community Process (JCP) program. The specification for the Java Rule Engine API (JSR 94) that defines a Java runtime API for rule engines by providing a simple API to access a rule engine from a Java Platform(Standard or Enterprise edition). The rule engines reduces an application’s maintenance as well as extensibility costs, lowering the complexity of components that implement complex business logic.

1. Jess Rule Engine for java

It is the fastest rule engines and scripting environment written in Java. Jess allows the developers to build Java software that can reason the supplied in the form of directive rules. Jess can straightaway manipulate and reason Java objects.

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2. JBoss Drools

Drools is widely excepted for its natural expressiveness of business rules with respect to business objects. It allows different authoring approaches and declarative keywords. This open source rule engine offers high performance execution and it’s Business Rules Management System is well-equipped to assists in enterprise class management.

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3. Termware

Termware’s application to the software system analysis are intended at providing better cost effectiveness of software maintenance under varied requirements and specified operations. It comes with a Java debug interface. Termware’s main range of applications include computer algebra systems, various formal models analysis and transformation, software engineering and problem-oriented languages (or DSL, from domain-specific) development.

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4. Hammurapi rules

This rule engine is effectively simplifies complex problems into smaller steps without introducing a specialized rules language. It doesn’t require the developers to learn the specialized rules language. Most importantly, the same rules and rulesets can be applied or forward or backward chaining depending on a problem.

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5. Open Rules

This business rules engines makes rules based system less expensive and easier to develop. It assists the corporations to meet the increasing demand for complex rulebases and high-transaction volumes with easier and more cost-effective solutions.

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6. Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor

This rule engine is used by Sun Microsystems for its Sun preventive services. Blaze Advisor 6.5 offers extensive features to assist the businesses in better verification and validation  for completeness and consistency of rules applied across rules lifecycle. It’s capabilities include verification of rules and procedural logic.

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7. SweetRules

It is an integrated set of tools for semantic web rules and ontologies.  SweetRules is based on the RuleML (Rule Markup/Modeling Language)which is emerging standard for semantic web rules. Further, it also supports the SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) and the OWL standard for semantic web ontologies. This powerful rule engine supports Logic Programs extension of RuleML that includes prioritizing conflict handling and procedural attachments for actions and tests.

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8. JRuleEngine

This open source java rule engine based on the Java Specification Request 94, release 1.1. This rules can be loaded through an XML file or by means of JRuleEngine APIs and can be stored externally in a database. It’s distribution includes jar file library, source files, examples, javadoc and readme.txt installation instructions.

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9. JxBRE

There is an growing demand for light weight rule engines. SourceForge.net offers this light-weight Business Rules Engine (BRE) for controlling the process flow for an application in an external entity. It is uses XML to control the application.
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10. JEOPS

This is essentially a forward chaining rule engine. It fillips the business process by rules in Java Application Servers, Client applications and Servlets.

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