Rule Engines

[vikrams sawant]

Hi Everybody ,
It is very nice to be in this forum . Well we are on a project and want a software (preferably opensource) a rule engine . I have got the following link http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/rule_engines which list various rule engine available. But we are not able to figure out which rule engine is best for out project. Well our project is simple event based project. where client are the mobile users .

The major requirement of our project is that there are various rules set by the administrator. These rules can be changed in near future. So on the Architect level we need a rule engine which can be feeded with various rules through a web interface. (Well we dont have the exact requirement of our project but we do forsee that we are going to feed the rule engine with database value)

Can any one suggest me a most popular rule engine used in the market that can meet our requirement .

[Brian Sam-Bodden]

I'm on my second enterprise implementation using Drools, I think is a very capable product that is maturing rapidly.

Brian

[Lasse Koskela]

Brian, (and sorry for hijacking the thread) how or for what problem domain have you used rules in these two enterprise implementations?

[Brian Sam-Bodden]

The most recent implementation of rules was in the pharmaceutical distribution environment where they had to create rules to determine what to ship to which farmacies (CVS, Revco, Walgreen), determine conversion factors between different companies shipping (cases versus boxes versus pack, etc) and determine if a specific costumer get a brand name versus a generic name.

Another one was on airline catering rules which let you determine what to load on which flights based of the location of the flight, duration, number of seats sold, etc. Like load ice in Atlanta but don't load in Miami if the flight is not an international flight unless the flight has been overbooked.

Also insurance is a big market for business rules, like determining fraud on a claim, etc. For example if both drivers have had accident before in the same set of cities (red flag) type of rules.

[Sripriya Sethuraman]

Suppose I need to pass the output of one rule to the next rule in sequence using drools rule engine - what do I do? There is info about ordering rules but how do I send the output value from one rule to another?