RTS (Rule Team Server), the authoring environment, contains improvements to the way business analysts locate business rules during the maintenance cycle of business rules. This "Semantic Query" feature allows users to write simple rules that locate other rules, and to find rules without knowing the structure of the repository. Users may search for rules that have a particular condition ("Find all business rules such that each business rule uses the value of loan amount") or action ("Find all business rules such that each business rule may lead to a state where a loan is rejected). Plus, the queries may be authored using a GUI environment very similar to that used to author business rules.

The Bottom Line ILOG JRules 6.5.2 ILOG, ilog.com Very Good  8.0 criteria score weight Rule Management 9 30% Performance 7 20% Developer tools 9 20% Documentation 6 10% Setup 7 10% Value 8 10% Cost: Starts at $50,000 for the Starter Pack and ranges to $500,000 or more depending on whether the customer is applying the BRMS to a single application, to a number of CPUs in multiple applications or services, or to larger enterprise deployments Platforms: Any operating system that supports Java (Mac OS X not officially supported) Bottom Line: The introduction of Transparent Decision Services makes this upgrade well worth considering for organizations implementing SOA. This version sees some maturation of the enhancements introduced in the 6.x line of the product, along with improvements to usability for business analysts. Involvement from technical staff is still recommended for most parts of the rule lifecycle, and some parts of the product are showing their age. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

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Performance ranking for JRules has not changed since the review of JRules 6.1 by James Owen. In optimized mode, JRules has good performance overall, but it is not at the top of the pack. For example, see the accompanying chart of WaltzDB test results, which shows optimized JRules ahead of JBoss Rules and Jess but behind Blaze Advisor and CLIPS. We performed all of our tests on a machine with an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.40GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, with all figures averaged over five runs of the benchmark. We tested on Linux, Solaris, and Windows, and no significant differences emerged across operating systems. The results shown come from tests on Solaris. 

Bumps in the road
A few areas still need smoothing. I've mentioned the documentation before, and this hasn't improved in 6.5.2. Although ILOG provides an applet for searching the documentation, this search mechanism just doesn't do as good a job as the old CHM (Microsoft Compiled HTML Help)manuals did. With such a large documentation set it's essential to allow users to easily find what they need, when they need it. A documentation road map would be a nice start. Tuning the search engine to identify higher-level, rule-oriented concepts (through metatags or good old-fashioned indexing) would also be helpful. The existing search engine is just too rudimentary, and it returns many pages of the same keyword. ILOG is aware of the problem and does have several people working to on it, so we can look forward to some improvement in future versions.

My other minor gripe is with the ruleflow and decision table editors. These two components still have some of the same quirks from JRules 5.x, and I hoped they'd be straightened out by now. The ruleflow editor especially could use some improvement. The current system of click and point for some artifacts and drag and drop for others, combined with menus that appear in odd places and icons that lose focus, not only impairs usability but is downright annoying. The ruleflow editor is also quite memory intensive; when used on Team Server, memory usage soared to 345MB of real RAM and 1.45GB of virtual memory. CPU usage also shot up to nearly 100 percent.

One welcome addition would be a floating palette that allows you to drag and drop all components onto the diagram. In the end, the ruleflow editor and decision tables work well enough to do the job, but they stand out as lacking polish in what is otherwise a very usable interface.

JRules6.5 brings a significant enhancement with the introduction of Transparent Decision Services, albeit only for SOAP over HTTP. Most parts of the system have received additional polish and improvements over 6.1, with the exception of the documentation. For those organizations implementing SOA, the transparent decision services alone are worth the upgrade. For any JRules shop still running 5.x, the enhancements to the Team Server warrant a serious look at the 6.x line.