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.

As we close in to finalising Drools 2.0 now would be a great time to help Drools. How can you do this?

Now that Drools 2.0 has stabalised I decided to checkout IKVM to see if Drools would run on .net.

JavaPolis was my first Drools presentation, in-fact I think THE first public Drools presentation, and had about thirty attendees. The slot allocated to me was a BOF, Birds of a Feather, these are technical sessions for emerging technologies, they are less formal and a good place to cut your teeth. I shared the slot with Bart Strubbe from JCS, who was very charming and a great chaperone being a JavaPolis veteran.

During some bug fixing of the Drools' Rete implementation I discoverd the need for an Object repository for fact retrieval via the FactHandle id. Being painfully aware of how much HashMaps are killing Drools performance and creating issues with garbage collection I searched for alternative implementations - pcj, trove and colt, commons-collections does not offer a primitive map - and benchmarked those against my own specialised implementation - the results, especially for memory, proved interesting.