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

Set up a web server for learning HTTP headers

Motivation We all follow the client-server model using the HTTP protocol for most of our web apps today. In development, we simply may have a backend API server and a frontend (web pages or mobile apps) only. However, it seemed that a proxy server is always required for production. In fact, most of the hardest issues in production come from integration. The requests and responses might be modified by the proxy server. Therefore, the understanding of HTTP protocol is one of the key skills to resolve those issues. I wanted to dive deep into HTTP with some core concepts such as caching, cookies, and CORS. I didn't intend to go quickly rather than moved slowly to have a well understanding of what I do. Prepare a server The easiest way is to use my laptop as a server then I can just use "localhost". I can also use ngrok to make my web server online. Finally, I use an online tool such as RedBot to check the HTTP headers. To make it more excited though, I deployed the app on A...

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 ...

A Template for Software Engineering Standards

Software engineering standard template A well-structured standard acts as a blueprint that guides engineers in their daily tasks and long-term goals. Below, I will outline a template for creating a comprehensive software engineering standard. Header The header serves as the document's identifier. It contains the following: Authors : The people who have contributed to the creation of the standard. Created Date : The date when the document was initially created. Version : The version of the standard. It is typically updated with significant changes. Status : The current status of the document, whether it's in draft, in-review, or official. Next Review Date : The date when the standard will be reviewed for relevancy and accuracy. Table of Contents A table of contents provides an overview of what the document contains, making it easier for readers to navigate through the document. Body The body of the standard comprises: Values : The core beliefs that guide the decision-maki...

Merging source in SVN

My team has used Primefaces for our projects. We sometimes have several branches of the projects with a new Primefaces's release. For example, we currently have a project with two branches, a branch for using Primeface 4.0, a trunk for using Primeface 5.0, and we are working these parallel branches. Our project looks like the following: - myProject - branches + primefaces4 + tag + trunk (primefaces5) My problem is how to copy the same source from the trunk to the branch "primefaces4". That is where SVN Merging can help! Here is the steps those I have conducted in my project. Step 1 : open the project with the branch "primefaces4" Step 2 : Team > Merge... Chose the trunk's URL. For example: http://192.168.9.10/svn/myProject/trunk Step 3 : Select the revision from "trunk" to merge. For example: +--revision--+--date--------+--author----+--comment---+ + 10 + 03.10.2014 + vanhuong + f1: part 3 + + 9 ...

Solving your data visualization needs with open source reporting

Most of applications have some types of data visualization needs: - Gather the data. - Perform calculation, sort, group, aggregate, total,.. - Present information professionally. and meeting user demand is crucial to the success of an application. To solve this problem, there are some different approaches: - Buy a closed-source commercial product (for example, Crystal Reports, JReport,..), we must to pay for a lot of features but maybe more of features we don't need. - Build a custom-developed solution, so we need a team to develop our solution but the problem is how much time and money that we need to spend for that. Nowaday, open source creates new choices. Firstly, we can leverage open source in a customer solution by plug-in it to our solution. Secondly, we can build open-source-based products by using open source code. There are many open source reporting tools for use in the enterprise such as BIRT, iReport, JasperReports,... In this post, I wou...

vhandit

Search This Blog