Introducing Drools

This talk provides a general overview of rule engines and specifically about Drools.
We will start with a quick introduction discussing the relevant differences between imperative and declarative programming, describing the most common use cases, highlighting when the latter should be preferred or at least considered; then, we will delve into more details about how these concepts have been implemented in Drools and into DRL (the Drools Rule Language).
We will also present DMN, an alternative notation to specify business rules, which is also fully supported by Drools; DMN is an open standard, also across different vendors.
Finally, we will give a look at different deployment models, giving practical demonstrations of how you can execute DRL and DMN rules on both the kie-server and on Kogito, the new cloud ready platform, that is the focus of our very active developments these days.

Speakers' bio

Mario Fusco - principal software engineer

Mario Fusco is a Java Champion and the Drools project lead. He is also a frequent speaker, one of the coordinators of JUG Milano and the co-author of "Modern Java in Action" published by Manning.

Matteo Mortari - principal software engineer

Matteo believes there is a whole new range of unexplored applications for Rule Engines (AI/Expert Systems) and Machine Learning; He also believes defining the Business Rules on the BRMS system not only enables knowledge inference from raw data, but most importantly when modeled using the DMN open standard, it helps to shorten the distance between experts and analysts, between developers and end-users, business stakeholders.