How do I use Drools with a PHP application?

Question

I have a PHP application my company has chosen to adopt on the one hand. We have already implemented a rules engine (Drools) for our Java application. Everything is running through a middleware platform via SOAP messaging. I know we are going to have to do a bunch of custom classes for our PHP application to handle situations that could be handled via the rules engine.

How do I integrate Drools with our PHP application? Should I just stick with SOAP messaging from the PHP app through our ESB to the rules engine and back?

Answer 1

Try not to add more moving parts to an already complicated system. I would recommend you follow your instinct and send data to be processed to the Java application via SOAP. That way you can consolidate your business logic in one area and reuse it in multiple places. That is indeed the power of distributed systems.