There are now a galore of Rules Engines starting from the very basic a_squeaky_rule_engine.htm to the Microsoft’s, Sun JRules or JBoss, iLogs and the other 300 odd initiators of rules engine ( including in many cases the workflow).
How about the need for a lean rules engine, simple/sequential that converts business decision to table based rules in its own native language integrated to the application rather than as a standalone process. For normal execution has a flow of value calculation through the Rules objects and for performance intensive operations is compiled and executed as a method once the server is up and running. Invocation first time penalty being a very minor charge for the efficiency of maintainability, scalability. This contrasts to maintaining a special Rules Engine server despite their optimizations will require overheads of performance even most enterprise applications cannot support. Why not have a lean rules engine that can support nearly all of the rules categorized as:
* Business logic
* Application logic
* Workflow logic
Yield an optimization that is integral and dynamically compiled to the application delivered and not standalone linked, unless it is a severely large enterprise application.
Some thoughts that lead to this Lean Rules Engine development in Smalltalk… Comments and posts are welcome..
Posted by skrishnamachari 
