Decision Tables in JBoss Drools getting an update

The JBoss Drools team sent me a link to a screencam of their latest work on web-based decision tables and rule templates. This latest one – Video demonstrating use of the new Guided Decision Table editor and Templating editor – shows how far they have come.

The JBoss Drools team sent me a link to a screencam of their latest work on web-based decision tables and rule templates. This latest one – Video demonstrating use of the new Guided Decision Table editor and Templating editor – shows how far they have come.

I did a fair bit of work with the JBoss Drools business rules management system at a Decision Management Solutions‘ client recently. They were using the Excel-based decision table, which was pretty nice, but which was not well integrated with the web-based environment (Guvnor). The video shows the new web-based one that the team is developing and this will definitely move the discussion along, making a lot of rich decision table functionality available in a pure web-editor. This is particularly interesting in the context of the recent discussions of a standard that would include a definition for decision tables.

Watch the video – defining the decision table won’t seem all that impressive unless you have coded one by hand in Drools but the usability of the table once built is pretty impressive. I don’t know what the formal release date is but you can get access to it by downloading the latest interim builds. You can also check out more of Michael’s recordings on his Vimeo channel.