Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9. Integration with Other
Knowledge Definitions
In this chapter, we will cover the different aspects of collaboration between processes and
other forms of knowledge, particularly rules and events. We will also discuss the import-
ance of rules in the business domain and define what business rules are. To understand how
business rules work in jBPM6, we will need to understand how a rule engine works and
how it interacts with the jBPM6 process engine, while comparing the way this interaction
occurs for jBPM6 and other BPM frameworks. We will discuss all these aspects with a
group of examples that will be easy enough to integrate into multiple business scenarios, as
well as flexible enough to be extended to cover very complex situations.
After we gain some practice in the rules realm, we will introduce more complex concepts,
such as adding temporal information into our rules to define events, time correlation
between them, and inferences to detect more complex, indirect events. This will allow us to
understand the full power of the rule engine and, in particular, how jBPM6 uses its runtime
internally to run both rules and processes from the same set of APIs.
The topics you will learn in this chapter are as follows:
• How the Drools rule engine is related to jBPM6
• How to apply business rules to business processes and vice versa
• How to define events and temporal rules
• How to configure our environment to be able to detect complex event situations