Best practices

Besides the knowledge of the internal architecture and processing logic about business rules, it is important to have an idea about how rules can be designed and what the do's and don'ts affecting rules negatively are, that is, about execution performance or maintainability. Within this section, some basic aspects regarding the definition of rule-based applications will be introduced that should be considered when practically starting with a project.

Defining the interface

Defining business rule services basically starts with the definition of the service contract, which means defining input and output data structures, operations, and so on. At first glance, this is not surprising because the contract-first implementation approach does not differentiate the definition of other non-rule services. The basic characteristics of a business rule service are statelessness and a synchronous interaction style. The latter means that the defined business logic can be processed efficiently...