Why Business Rules Engine Matter

"A good DSL minimizes the 'communication gap' between a domain concept and the code that implements it" - Robert C. Martin

A Use Case

It looks like adopting a new technology is always driven by a business need.

The organizations, such as banks, have their own business processes (such as data gathering and document management). These processes are different from others but usually the differences are not big. How do we build a product which can be reused the similar features but still be adaptable with the specific requirements of each bank? Then, the answer is we should have a library/framework. There is an idea that we can implement this library/framework by using a business rules engine. Which has the following benefits:

Be able to modify implementation of business domain at runtime (such as XML, CSV)
Source code is more readable for both developers and domain experts. Therefore, source code can be consider it as a document

Since Business Rules Engines support for Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)

"The purpose of Business Rules Engines is to define a representation of business logic in as human readable fashion as possible. This allows both subject matter experts and developers to work with and understand the same representation of the business logic." [3]

Then, why DSLs?

"A good DSL minimizes the "communication gap" between a domain concept and the code that implements it, just as agile practices optimize the communications within a team and with the project's stakeholders."
- Uncle Bob

"A well-chosen DSL can make it easier to understand a complicated block of code, thus improving the productivity of those working with it. It can also make it easier to communicate with domain experts, by providing a common text that acts as both executable software and a description that domain experts can read to understand how their ideas are represented in a system."
- Martin Flower

Should we use Business Rules Engines for manipulating the Graphical User Interface (GUI)?

The answer is: why not? This is a big idea and I've once mentioned about it at this post. However, I have experienced some issues:

I have to make requests from client to server whenever I need a business decision. There are some cases unnecessarily to call the server such as client side validation (imagine you say a field is mandatory, for example). Sine we always consider the performance issues.
The huge effort will be spent for complexity of building the stable framework for handling the communication between business rules and GUI. For instance, working with the component with a list of items such as table, list, so on.

How do you think? Leave your comments down below!

References:
[1]. Robert C.Martin, Clean Code, A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, Chapter 11 - System.
[2]. Martin Flower, Domain-Specific Languages
[3]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language

Comments

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years" - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Attribute 'for' of label component with id xxxx is not defined

I got the warning in the log file when I have used the tag <h:outputLabel> without attribute " for " in xhtml file. It was really polluting my server log files. The logged information actually makes sense anyway! We could find an answer as the following: "Having h:outputLabel without a "for" attribute is meaningless. If you are not attaching the label, you should be using h:outputText instead of h:outputLabel." However, these solutions are not possible just for my situation. Instead of using h:outputText for only displaying text, my team has used h:outputLabel too many places. We were nearly in our release time (next day) so it is quite risky and takes much efforts if we try to correct it. Because the style (with CSS) is already done with h:ouputLabel . The alternative by adding attribute " for " the existing h:outputLabel is not reasonable either. I really need to find another solution. Fortunately, I came across a way if I cha...

If We Want to Go Fast, We Need to Go Well

Have you ever thought that we won't need to code anymore because programs might be generated from specification? The answer can be yes or no; there is still arguing about it. The programming language is more and more closed to the requirements. The starting is from a very low level as Assembly to a very high level like Python. However, it doesn't make much sense when saying that we will eliminate coding. For me, we currently still need to express our ideas in exact words that tells the machine what we want. Otherwise, I hope in the future the machine is intelligent enough to understand our requirements directly from our words. ;) Take a look at the famous quote of Robert C.Martin about what I mentioned above: "Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we wi...

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent"> <div id="child"> </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{ position: relative; overflow:hidden; } #child{ position: absolute; top: -1; right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

vhandit

Search This Blog