Summary

In this chapter, we showed what a Business Rules Management System does, how useful it can be in an information system, and how we can implement one, starting with a functional example and demonstrating afterward another example relating to authorizations, which are one of the most used sets of business rules in software applications.

Just like BPMN engines, BRMS engines are not used very often. In fact, business rules are – in the great majority of cases – implemented in code expressions or compiled into applications. This is absolutely normal because a BRMS represents an important investment, and implementing such complex applications really needs a strong business case, where business rules change very frequently, they are associated with high regulatory or marketing constraints (such as the necessity to trace all business rules and their changes), there is capacity to simulate the effects of new versions of sets of business rules, and so on. It is clear...