Some decisions are more easy then they seam at first.
If you have komplex logic and rules in your software, for example in my case for accounting invoices in an interface between Point of Sale Systems and Central SAP Finance System, then think about choosing a rules managment software, to reduce complexitiy in your software architecture.
Instead of complex constructions making your solution hard to maintain and understand, I extract most of the logic into a rules engine and query this at runtime.
Advantage:
- keeps your software simple => cheap to extend, maintain and operate
- consider letting business user change some or all of the rules => faster lifecycle, time-to-market
- performance. done right, the rules engine outruns every database or memory based logic with ease.
What I liked best is, that both IBM and Redhat offer a EJB way of accessing their rules engine.
So for now, there is a bright future, but still a lot of miles to go on this journey.
I will keep posting how it worked out.
