Best of Two Worlds – Bringing Business Rules and SOA Together
The WSO2 Business Rules Server brings the agility of business rules to your Service Oriented Architecture toolkit. Based on a solid platform for hosting business rules, our BRS excels at extending the capabilities of your SOA.
Enterprise architects have long appreciated the benefits of separating business logic from infrastructure code. This separation allows you to more readily update and evolve business logic, often in the form of rules, which naturally increases the agility of the enterprise. WSO2’s BRS allows business rules to be encapsulated in a simpler, more direct dialect, one closer to the language of business analysts. And this more accessible dialect ensures that the technology directly meets the enterprise’s business needs.
SOA-based Business Rules
More Efficient:
Business rules are more effective when integrated smoothly into your SOA. Exposing rules as services in your SOA makes it easy to encapsulate and run those rules as services. Allowing rules to interact with other services enables those rules to easily operate over and control key data and message flows.
Getting it Just Right:
The same design principles you use to design your service ecosystem can be used to great benefit with rules – such as maximizing the potential for reusability and achieving the right level of granularity.
Smooth Integration:
Rules can also benefit from the same governance techniques and technologies that have proven invaluable for your services – such as publishing a repository for rules so they can be shared, versioned, commented upon, or tagged. Or managed with change notifications, dependency analysis, and lifecycle management. Or monitored in an integrated fashion with your SOA monitoring capabilities.
Add Rules to Your Toolkit with the WSO2 Business Rules Server
The WSO2 Business Rules Server adds all these capabilities to the WSO2 Carbon platform. As a stand-alone server, the Business Rules Server allows you to deploy a rule set as a service, through a simple wizard interface for defining or uploading rules, and a built-in rule editor. The server does all the hard work of providing high-quality WS-* or RESTful service interfaces, including generating the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The WSO2 Carbon management console enables and provisions security, reliability, and other qualities of service—and allows you to monitor the results.
Drools? Can do!
The WSO2 Business Rules Server allows you to plug in your favorite (JSR94-compatible) rule engine. Most users will find Drools their first choice, with a wide user community and popular Eclipse-based tooling. The WSO2 Business Rules Server provides all the structure necessary to leverage Drools in conjunction with your SOA.
Add the Power of Rules to Your SOA
On the flip side, the SOA itself can benefit from the smooth integration of rules. Rules can be used to help direct message flows to the right place. Rules can help meet complex data access or security management policies. Rules can help customize the management and monitoring capabilities of the SOA to your unique requirements.
As part of the modular WSO2 Carbon architecture, the heart of the Business Rules Server – the rules component – can now be used throughout the SOA. For example, use our BRS within message mediations in the WSO2 ESB, as part of workflows in the WSO2 Business Process Server, monitored using the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor, and more. And rules can be stored and managed with the WSO2 Governance Registry.
With the addition of rules, the WSO2 Carbon platform becomes an even more powerful platform for you to build and deploy your enterprise applications – including cloud deployment options.
Make Your Bottom Line Shine with Open Source
As with all our products, the WSO2 Business Rules Server is 100% no-gimmicks open source under the Apache license. No onerous license restrictions, no costly “enterprise editions,” and no special sauce that costs extra, making WSO2 an easy choice for adding the benefits of rules to your business toolkit. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain!
Download the WSO2 Business Rules Server today, or contact us for help getting started.
WSO2 Business Rules Server
- In Action
- Features
- Architecture
Expose your existing rules as services so that they can be reused and composed by rest of your infrastructure
As an Architect, Shane has been using the Drools rule languages to analyze log files and performance data off-line to identify bottlenecks in the system. With the WSO2 BRS, Shane is able to easily wrap those rules up as live services so they can be invoked on demand or monitor conditions constantly. Shane uploads his existing rule files and the supporting logic definitions to the rule repository, and using administrative console features such as Try-It he is able to perform some manual tests on the system. Using the automatically-generated WSDL for the rule service, Shane writes some simple test clients to verify the rules are operating as expected, and then uses the WSO2 ESB to route live data to the rules service for real-time analysis, and to dynamically change message routing patterns as a result of rule conditions..
Separate your business logic from programming logic through rules, which can be edited, versioned, and governed separately.
A mobile company currently has all the logic for its various mobile service offerings implemented as monolithic code. However, Business Analysts are regularly requesting changes to this code to introduce new services – from new service levels to limited-time promotions. The application development team is stretched thin trying to implement these constant changes without destablizing the whole system. The team recognizes the mismatch between the business logic cycle and the development cycle, and pursues an approach that separates these two concerns cleanly. The business logic is factored out into a set of rules defining the overall behavior of the system, and the code supports these behaviors without itself encoding substantial business logic. Henceforth, changes requested by the Business Analysts result in simple changes to the rules, stored and edited in the registry. The company evolves quickly to offer innovative new services and finds competitive advantage – and a stronger bottom line – as a result.
React to changes in your system through rules
An IT department needs to react to changes in the environment, especially to critical conditions. Rules offer a complement or even a simple alternative to a comprehensive Business Activity Monitoring system. Rules representing critical system conditions are deployed as rule services and service invocations inject “facts” about system performance into the rule engine. As rule conditions are satisfied, notifications and alerts fire, bringing the state of the system to the notice of the administrators for inspection and resolution.
