Maintaining drl (technical) rules in Drools Guvnor

Question

I'm new to the world of business rules, but I think I've understood the concepts of Drools Expert and Drools Guvnor, yet I'm still a bit confused how/when/why exactly use Guvnor in comparison to Expert. And also, whether they rule each other out or are capable or even prefered to work side-by-side. Below are some highlighted topics that puzzle and a bit of explanation behind my concerns, mainly concentrating in application maintainability.

Does Guvnor have all the functionality that is available in Expert plus more?

I know that Guvnor is Business Rule Management System (BRMS) that takes control of storing(including versioning) the rules and exposing services to use of other apps. Guvnor contains UIs (text and graphical) for generating the rules and an engine for running them, so in this sense I guess it contains all functionality of the Expert system. Based on my requirements, I'm quite sure Guvnor is what I need, but do I need Drools Expert for anything after that?

Or in other words, does Drools Expert offer something that is not present in Guvnor?

Testing rules in Guvnor

Many tutorials on Drools I've seen start with TDD example where the rules are tested with simple jUnit tests. Once a rule is imported to Guvnor (or just generated there), is there any way to use/write unit tests for it?

Should the testing be done via exposed interfaces (REST) only?

If the users of the system are to develop their own rules, I don't expect them to write any tests. Mainly interested in 'core' rules and their maintainability here.

In case of 'core' rules, should they be stored in a version controlling system and imported to Guvnor on scheduled updates for the complete system? In this case the unit tests could be written for these rules and automatically executed as part of build cycle.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Based on one of your questions, there's something I should clear up first. In essence:

• Expert is a rules engine runtime.
• Guvnor is a tool for writing and storing rules, which will subsequently be executed in Expert.

Guvnor doesn't provide a runtime for your rules, other than what is required for the test harnesses. You will always need Expert for your runtime environment. Guvnor enables you to manage the rules and store them. It also provides some handy GUI tools such as the guided editor and web decision tables. However, you can also edit rules in an IDE such as Eclipse and push them to Guvnor using the Guvnor WebDav Eclipse plugins.

Typically, you will have a Guvnor web application on one server and your application(s) on elsewhere. You can download the compiled rules from Guvnor into your application build, and deploy them with your application. Alternatively, you can define a URL resource in your code to create your knowledge base, pointing at the Guvnor package URL. In that case, your application can load the knowledge base on start-up and reload it at runtime.

For example the following code will download a package snapshot called "Approved" as a resource for building a knowledge base.

UrlResource urlResource = 
    (UrlResource) ResourceFactory.newUrlResource(
        "http://my.guvnor.local/.../package/mypackage/Approved");
urlResource.setBasicAuthentication("enabled");
urlResource.setUsername("myusername");
urlResource.setPassword("mypassword");
KnowledgeBuilder builder = KnowledgeBuilderFactory.newKnowledgeBuilder();
builder.add(urlResource, resource.getType());

Edit - Take a look at KnowledgeAgent if you wish to have rules reloaded at runtime when they are changed in Guvnor.

My main reason for using Guvnor is to enable non-technical users to author rules using decision tables and DSL-based guided editors.

I like to edit technical rules in Eclipse, where I can easily write unit tests around them and evaluate that they are behaving as I expect. I find that much easier than the testing capabilities in Guvnor. And although Guvnor provides some version control, I much prefer Subversion/Git as version control for my technical rules.

I also write DSL in Eclipse, which I then deploy to Guvnor. This makes guided rules much simpler to work with for non-technical users.

Testing rules

With regards testing, there are a few options. There is testing functionality in Guvnor, which enables you to write expectations based on various inputs. However, I personally find that way too clunky and limiting to use. I far prefer to write tests in Java/JUnit.

First of all, you can write simple unit tests, which load one or two technical rules, written in DRL and evaluate that they are activating when you think they should, and generating inferred facts where appropriate.

For more complex testing, I write tests which create a knowledge base using a package in Guvnor, insert facts and fire rules, in order to evaluate that the package as a whole is working correctly, including those rules which have been built in guided editors or decision tables.

Other uses for Guvnor

It's worth noting that the Guvnor editor functionality is becoming much richer, and it is becoming an editor and repository for more than just rules. For instance, there is rich tooling for BPM processes, which should soon be better than what you can get in an IDE such as Eclipse.

Summary

If all your rules are written by yourself and other developers in DRL, then there is little benefit to using Guvnor. In fact I would find it a hindrance. However, if you wish to take advantage of the guided editors or decision tables, or you wish to have 'business' users manage some of the rules, then you should take a deeper look at Guvnor.