Chapter 18. Using Business Rules to Implement Services
We have looked at how we can use the rules engine to define business rules that can then be invoked as a decision component within a composite. The examples we have used so far have been pretty trivial. However, the rules engine uses the Rete algorithm, which was developed by researchers into artificial intelligence in the 1970s.
Rete has some unique qualities, when compared to more procedural-based languages such as PL/SQL, C, C++, or Java, making it ideal for evaluating a large number of interdependent rules and facts. This not only makes it simpler to implement highly complex rules than would typically be the case with more procedural-based languages, but also makes it suitable for implementing particular categories of first-class business services.
In this chapter, we look in more detail at how the rule engine works, and armed with this knowledge, we write a set of rules to implement the auction algorithm responsible for...
