Table of Contents
This section describes how to get started with Drools Flow. It will guide you to create and execute your first Drools Flow process.
The best way to get started is to use the Drools Eclipse Plugin for the Eclipse development environment. It allows users to create, execute and debug Drools processes and rules. To get started with the plugin, you first need an installation of Eclipse 3.4.x including the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF). Eclipse can be downloaded from the following link (if you do not know which version of eclipse you need, simply choose the "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers", and this one already includes the GEF plugin as well):
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
Next you need to install the Drools Eclipse plugin. Download the Drools Eclipse IDE plugin from the link below. Unzip the downloaded file in your main eclipse folder (do not just copy the file there, extract it so that the feature and plugin jars end up in the features and plugin directory of eclipse) and (re)start Eclipse.
http://www.jboss.org/drools/downloads.html
To check that the installation was successful, try opening the Drools perspective:
Click the "Open Perspective" button in the top right corner of your Eclipse window,
select "Other..." and pick the Drools perspective. If you cannot find the Drools perspective
as one of the possible perspectives, the installation probably was unsuccessful. Check
whether you executed each of the required steps correctly: Do you have the right version
of Eclipse (3.4.x)? Ensure that you have Eclipse GEF installed, by checking whether the
org.eclipse.gef_3.4.*.jar
exists in the plugins directory in your
Eclipse root folder. Make sure that you have extracted the Drools Eclipse
plugin correctly, by checking whether the org.drools.eclipse_*.jar
exists in the plugins directory in your Eclipse root folder. If you cannot find the
problem, try contacting us, either on irc or on the user mailing list. More information
can be found on our homepage: