Table of Contents
The Eclipse based IDE provides developers (and very technical users) with an environment to edit and test rules in various formats, and integrate it deeply with their applications. In cases where you prefer business rules and web tooling, you will want to look at the BRMS (but using the BRMS and the IDE together is not uncommon).
The Drools IDE is delivered as an Eclipse plug-in, which allows you to author and manage rules from within Eclipse, as well as integrate rules with your application. This is an optional tool, and not all components are required to be used, you can use what components are relevant to you. The Drools IDE is also a part of the Red Hat Developer Studio (formerly known as JBoss IDE).
This guide will cover some of the features of JBoss Drools, in as far as the IDE touches on them (it is assumed that the reader has some familiarity with rule engines, and Drools in particular. It is important to note that none of the underlying features of the rule engine are dependent on Eclipse, and integrators are free to use their tools of choice, as always ! Plenty of people use IntelliJ with rules, for instance.
You can get the plug-in either as a zip to download, or from an update site. Refer to the chapter on installation.
The rules IDE has the following features
Textual/graphical rule editor
An editor that is aware of DRL syntax, and provides content assistance (including an outline view)
An editor that is aware of DSL (domain specific langauge) extensions, and provides content assistance.
RuleFlow graphical editor
You can edit visual graphs which represent a process (a rule flow). The RuleFlow can then be applied to your rule package to have imperative control.
Wizards for fast creation of
a "rules" project
a rule resource, either as a DRL file or a "guided rule editor" file (.brl)
a Domain Specific language
a decision table
a ruleflow
A domain specific language editor
Create and manage mappings from your user's language to the rule language
Rule validation
As rules are entered, the rule is "built" in the background and errors reported via the problem view where possible
The above features make use of Eclipse infrastructure and features, with all of the power of Eclipse being available.