BeanShell is a scripting component, and Jess has a scripting component, too. But Jess also contains (and in fact, the most important part of Jess is) a rule engine -- a software component that detects
patterns in large amounts of data and acts on them, very efficiently. BeanShell doesn't do anything like this -- it's not meant to.
Now, perhaps a more interesting question is, "Why doesn't Jess incorporate BeanShell as its scripting component?" I looked at this, a long time ago. As we've discussed in another
thread on this forum, though, Java-like languages aren't very good at expressing declarative rules; the syntax Jess uses is much better suited.
[ September 03, 2003: Message edited by: Ernest Friedman-Hill ]
