Chapter 2. Getting Started

Table of Contents

Installation
Creating your first process
Executing your first process

This section describes how to get started with Drools Flow. It will guide you to create and execute your first Drools Flow process.

Installation

The best way to get started is to use the Drools Eclipse Plugin. This is a plugin for the Eclipse development environment that allows users to create, execute and debug Drools processes and rules. To get started with the plugin, you first need an Eclipse 3.4.x (as well as the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) plugin installed). 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)? Do you have Eclipse GEF installed (check whether the org.eclipse.gef_3.4.*.jar exists in the plugins directory in your eclipse root folder)? Did you extract the Drools Eclipse plugin correctly (check 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 (e.g. on irc or on the user mailing list), more info can be found no our homepage here:

http://www.jboss.org/drools/