WSO2 has added a business rules server, which can take full advantage of the platform, to its open-source Web service middleware.
This week, the company announced the availability of WSO2 Business Rules Server (BRS). The server uses the JBoss Drools rules engine by default, but can plug in any other engine.
While BRS is a 1.0 product without many bells and whistles, it derives a lot of capability from the WSO2 stack, said CTO Paul Fremantle. For example, BRS utilizes the WSO2 registry as a repository to store, version and manage rules, he said.
The integration is possible through a retooling of WSO2’s middleware that shipped last year, built according to the OSGi specification. OSGi implements a component model for the Java Virtual Machine to make Java more modular.
BRS also integrates with the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus. A developer could write a rule that looks at incoming transactions to determine, for instance, whether a customer is at a gold, silver or platinum level, and enforce SLAs or route traffic based upon that customer, Fremantle added.
A second way to use the rules engine is to deploy rules as a service that can be called from any logic, he said. The WSO2 middleware can generate a WSDL to deploy and manage the rule. Activity monitoring and security are also provided for the service.
BRS is available as a free download, and as a WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machine running on either the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud or VMware ESX.
