| | |  | Software Engineering | Home » » » How to Build a Business Rules Engine: Extending Application Functionality through Metadata Engineering (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | · This is the only book that demonstrates how to develop a business rules engine. Covers user requirements, data modeling, metadata, and more.
· A sample application is used throughout the book to illustrate concepts. The code for the sample application is available online at http://www.refdataportal.com.
· Includes conceptual overview chapters suitable for management-level readers, including general introduction, business justification, development and implementation considerations, and more.
· This is the only book that demonstrates how to develop a business rules engine. Covers user requirements, data modeling, metadata, and more.
· A sample application is used throughout the book to illustrate concepts. The code for the sample application is available online at http://www.refdataportal.com.
· Includes conceptual overview chapters suitable for management-level readers, including general introduction, business justification, development and implementation considerations, and more. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Malcolm Chisholm | | Paperback:
| 483 pages | | Publisher:
| Morgan Kaufmann | | Publication Date:
| November 12, 2003 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1558609180 | | Product Length:
| 9.22 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.34 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.93 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.84 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.13 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.32 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.94 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.9 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 7 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 7 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 41 found the following review helpful:
 Warning: Read before buying!Aug 10, 2005
By a software developer
As a C++ developer recently tasked to design a "rules-engine" for a real-time application, I purchased this book with the hope of discovering an alternative to a "true" rule-engine (i.e., one that utilizes rule chaining and a pattern matching algorithm).
Although this book does give a step-by-step description of how to implement a "rules-engine" using Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications, there is absolutely no discussion of how a rules-engine could be implemented in any other development environment.
The relevant material in the book could easily be presented in about 200 pages or less. Rules are not really addressed until chapter 15. Most of the early chapters deal with such topics that are tangential at best. Just one chapter discussing the differences between the type of rule-engine described in the book and an expert system type of rule-engine would have made the book useful.
40 of 46 found the following review helpful:
 Practical aspects of business rulesMar 07, 2004
By Mike Tarrani
"Jazz Drummer"
Although this book's title may lead you to believe it is solely about developing a business rules engine, it is much more. First, to answer the question that developers may want to know about the book - yes, there is code and it can be downloaded from the web site that supports the book. However, in my opinion, the real reason to buy this book is to gain a deeper understanding of the practical aspects of incorporating business rules into applications. Where books such as "Principles of the Business Rule Approach" (ISBN 0201788934) cover the subject well from the conceptual and systems analyst perspectives, this is the only book to approach business rules from a tools and integration perspective.Topics range from data modeling to working with batch processes, and every relevant consideration in between. You'll find that the author heavily favors the use of reference data, which is no coincidence because he wrote, in my opinion, the definitive book on that topic as well - "Managing Reference Data in Enterprise Databases" (ISBN 1558606971). More importantly, though, is how thoroughly this book covers all issues associated with developing and implementing a business rules engine, especially with respect to enterprise data architectures and associated databases. If you have mastered the concepts of business rules and are ready to implement them this book is the place to start.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 excellent technology primer for this subject areaMar 23, 2008
By K. Ambrose
As a database designer and programmer for over a decade, I had always wondered how a business rules engine might actually be implemented. What were the neccessary "parts"? What was the overall technology strategy for turning documented rules into executable actions? What might an interface need to look like, and what functionality would it need to offer to support a working business rules engine? All these questions are answered in this book. The implementation design provided (as working code in Microsoft Access and VBA) is not "enterprise" ready in the sense that is would support hundreds of users and tens of thousands of business rules. But it is a comprehensive "proof of concept" - with working code - that clearly addresses design and implementation strategies and methods required for these engines. This book has now surely given me more understanding about how these engines can work than probably anyone else has in my organization of over 1000 employees (that admittedly has never implemented this type of funtionality but may very well need to do so sometime in the future).
Prerequisites for understanding this tutorial would be sound understanding of relational database theory (what effective information processing systems do not require this understanding?), good basic understanding of conventional database development concepts, as well as understanding of typical data processing required for both interactive data entry and batch processing of data.
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 DisappointingJan 03, 2007
By D. A. Frost
This book was very disappointing, for several reasons: Firstly, I find it hard to believe that with the author's supposed years of expertise in this area, he advocates the design approach that is contained in this book - an approach that seems to be at odds with modern commercially-available rules engines. Secondly, he then spends most of the book building a "rules engine" and most of the book seems to be a "how to build" manual for this piece of software, which I can't imagine anyone else ever using. I recommend that anyone interested in rules engines look elsewhere.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Too confusingSep 28, 2009
By Bond007
"rk"
The book is more focused on business rules engine setup from a physical table design perspective. It fails to clearly elaborate on the modeling of the declarative structure of business rules as ERD and associated table structure. The approach outlined and the examples do not reflect the all categories of business rules. Also it is not clear from the sample application that is provided for download how different category of rules are designed and assembled for transactional working. In fact the sample rules implementation in the book is more associated with (physical) application screen design rather than organizational process logic; also, such implementation could have been more easily done through triggers in an enterprise class DBMS like Oracle than desktop DBMS like Access which lacks such capability.
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