mproctor - Drools joins JBoss

Drools joins JBoss

[ Mark Proctor ] 14:28, Thursday, 13 October 2005

The Drools move to JBoss really is a good thing for everyone, with no down sides, key Drools developers were consulted throughout the process and all are more than happy with the situation.

Rule engines are a specialised field, this is recognised by JBoss, and they trust us as the experts so we retain full control of development. I now get to work full time on Drools and we will hopefully be hiring another full time Drools developer. Bob McWhirter will continue to be involved in Drools, in an official JBoss capacity under a part time basis, as he continues to have other responsibilities. This will really accelerate the development process; which benefits everyone.

Drools will continue to work as a standalone product, as part of the JBoss JEMS stack. We will of course work on great JBoss AS integration, especially with jBPM - however we will continue to fully support other AS. I want Drools to be used absolutely everywhere and will do everything I can to achieve this; I want NO artificial barriers to adoption - this has always been important to me and the main reason for not going LGPL. The license will stay BSDish, although we may change it to a standardised BSD/ASF/MIT license – this has been planned for a while and will help to avoid confusion.

Now that Drools is part of JBoss we can work on strong jBPM integration. We will bring standardised and easily understandable solutions to Workflow/BPM and Business Rules integration to the masses. I have already met with Tom Baeyens and we have identified some initial areas to work on for our first product release in Q1 2006. This is exciting work and will provide new ways of being able to build better affordable solutions without the high costs of existing specialised systems.

On a more personal note neither I nor Bob McWhirter are corporate type people, in fact Bob is famous for it!!! I would not have joined JBoss without full autonomy in an environment that would fully support my vision and the Drools community. We expected JBoss to take bully boy tactics in negotiations; however they were quite the contrary - this was unexpected and very refreshing and one of the key factors in my decision. Throughout the entire process they were surprisingly flexible; they listened to all our concerns and responded supportively - this was especially demonstrated in licensing talks, I hope the community takes note of that. While JBoss would have liked us to LGPL they respected our reasoning and never put any undue pressure on us. Since joining I have been continually asked about community feedback and response from all key JBoss people, Marc Fleury has taken a personal interest in this and repeatedly asked me if there is anything more he can do. This concern has been truly genuine and very much appreciated by me. Luckily the response has been great; we have had overwhelmingly positive feedback, especially once we clarified the licensing.

It would take 24+ months for a small company without an existing track record or infrastructure to try and build a strong brand around Drools, with all the support/consultancy/training/partner infrastructure that is needed for enterprise systems - this is a huge risk and one that I and Iterion were very much aware of. With JBoss we can achieve these in 6 months to a far greater effect, with negligible risk; as JBoss depends heavily on partners this will result in a larger ROI, due to scaling, with far less risk for them.

Congratulations ! I am happy that Drools will now enjoy the JBoss infrastructure and support. However, I would have personally liked Drools to be aligned with a Apache Foundation type organization, which has similar thoughts not only on licensing but on product ownership and usage. JBoss is an excellent contributor to the open source world but it to me it is yet another corporate chasing profits and market leadership and not necessarily great products. Also, since your and Bob's time would go in migrating the project to JBoss Labs and integrating with the JBoss tools, it implies that time otherwise spent on making a better open source rules engine is going to be wasted on something that not necessarily all Drools users are waiting for.

--Shashank "Shanky" Tiwari, October 28, 2005 09:01 PM

Hi,
I think Drool has some strong features but what is the future after moving as a part of JBOSS is still to be seen. Personally I would also like to align with Apache Software Foundation. Interestingly there is already one open source rules engine "Lexicon" that seems to be havin ASF type of license. Currently I am evaluating Drools and Lexicon and the more deep I am getting involved I kind of like Lexicon a bit more because of its integration with Database, Web Services and basic Web Based User Interface. They just have two months down the road and so many things are already covered in the 1st Beta release. Drools definitely needs to bridge this gap by providing a good Web based UI.

Lexicon's future Road Map is very clear where as Drools does not clearly state the road map instead it has many "Unresolved Issues" mentioned under the Development Roadmap.

Thanks,
-Hridaeysh

--Hridayesh Gupta, December 12, 2005 07:00 PM

Hridaeysh - drools comes from a back ground of being a core engine. a lot of the features you talk about will be there (most people have built them into their own applications, but not opened them up as yet). drools is really just starting, it is from a solid base engine, which many others don't have.

a simple rule engine is really a scripting environment, with sugar, which is fine as that is all a lot of people need, for now. but in the coming years, are strong engine at the core will be needed - which so far only commercial vendors provide. it is this space where drools will fit in.

we will update the dev roadmap soon - things have been fairly disrupted since jboss came along as you can understand.

--Michael, December 13, 2005 12:17 AM