Technical Documents

Rules Integrated Development Environment(IDE): Advanced development of business rules

Haley Systems today announced the release of Rules IDE, the state-of-the-art integrated development environment (IDE) that incorporates business rules management systems and advanced debugging technologies. Complementing Haley Systems powerful business rules management system and world-renowned performance, Rules IDE is ideal for the development of large-scale solutions.

Built using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Rules IDE makes it easy for Eclipse adopters to use HaleyRulesTM for their applications. With the release of Rules IDE existing HaleyRulesTM-based developers gain access to state-of-the-art development tools, resulting in more efficient project construction and increased productivity.

IDE

The Rules Integrated Development Environment (IDE) combines the powerful rules environment with a sophisticated development environment. The result is a drastically shortened debugging phase for creating rule-based applications. The debugging phase is shortened by the advanced integrated debugging environment that analyzes the effects of various changes and detects circular rule cycles, rules with no actions, rules with the same condition and different actions, and a multitude of other potential anomalies within your rule set. The debugger will also allow developers to display rule execution flow, set break points, and conduct traces. This powerful set of tools will be familiar to most developers who find the visual debugging environment attractive and cost effective.

One of the main benefits of the Rules IDE is that any developer can use the Rules IDE to interactively debug a set of rules or to examine the output generated while processing a set of rules. The Rules IDE performs these actions by receiving information about the execution of a set of rules from an XML stream which must be compliant with RIDE.XML. RIDE, or the Remote IDE XML schema is an XML interchange format that defines both messages to describe rules processing and commands to control that processing. Depending on whether the developer wishes to debug in a real-time or recorded session, the Rules IDE will either open an XML compliant RIDE file or it will open a RIDE supported TCP/IP connection. If a TCP/IP connection is used then the Rule ID can send RIDE commands to the rules engine across the TCP/IP.

For Developers using a recorded session to debug a RIDE file is necessary however, developers do not need a live connection to a rules engine to debug the rule. The real-time session uses a binary, Eclipse, configuration, or RML file in conjunction with a connection to either the HaleyRules-JP or HaleyRules-SP engine through a TCP/IP port for RIDE commands. For debugging using the Rules IDE in a real-time session developers may choose to debug locally by connection to a either HaleyRules-JP or HaleyRules-SP which has been installed on the developers PC or by connecting remotely.

IDE Screenshot

By using the Rules IDE debugger developers will be able to

  • determine why a rule is inactive
  • pinpoint what facts caused a rule to fire
  • Establish what rules caused a certain fact be asserted or retracted.

The release of 5.4 will allow customers to utilize the Rules IDE for both real-time and recorded debugging session. However, users will only be able to debug real-time sessions locally on either the HaleyRules-JP or HaleyRules-SP engine. With the release of 6.0 early next year, developers will be able to debug real-time sessions locally or remotely; ultimately allowing maximum collaboration and flexibility within individual development teams.