Blaze Advisor 5.1 shines for developers and business analysts

For any large company struggling to maintain large, complex Java applications that involve thousands of business rules, Blaze Advisor 5.1 should prove exceptional. It is easy to learn and most business analysts will understand it without trouble.

In effect, once set up by the programmers, Blaze Advisor moves control of the business rules from the IT department to the various business departments. Like other Java-based BRMSes (business rules management systems) — such as ILOG’s JRules, PST’s OPSJ, and Sandia Labs’ Jess — Blaze

Advisor is basically a rule-based inferencing engine. Among these, however, only JRules and Blaze Advisor have all the features needed to support enterprise projects: multiple views of the same rules, rapid code deployment for various installations, easily maintainable code, version control, structured user access, excellent debugging tools, and an English-like rule-building language that makes maintaining rules easy for developers and business analysts alike.

Blaze Advisor shines in the wealth of tools it offers to both programmers and business analysts. Version 5.1 adds to this wealth new features such as rule inheritance and decision trees, in addition to improvements in existing features such as decision tables and versioning. But Blaze’s light dims in performance, as I found when running the standard benchmarking tests for Java rules engines, the Miss Manners and Waltz tests.

Bells and Whistles

New decision trees give programmers and business analysts a powerful way to visualize and edit chains of dependent rules. Almost any task that can be done from within other rule views can be done in decision trees including creating or changing condition nodes or action nodes, reordering the sequence of conditions, and changing the order in which the rules engine processes the rules.

Decision tables, updated in version 5.1, offer the business analyst a view of the rules in the form of a traditional spreadsheet, but allow the programmer to see the rules in the “raw” format. As the business analyst changes the spreadsheet, the underlying rules also change.

Blaze Advisor’s internal versioning and access control mechanism is also greatly improved in version 5.1, and is now probably one of the best in the industry. In addition to providing a rule check-in/check-out repository, Blaze allows you to have several versions of the rules for different applications and permits control over who has access to which rule or rule sets.

Also new in version 5.1, and unique to Blaze Advisor among BRMSes, is rule inheritance. Here Fair Isaac has taken what is usually considered a problem — called rule subsumption in the AI world — and turned it into an asset. If you create a sub-rule in a decision tree, you can inherit all of the essential attributes of the root rule. Rule inheritance certainly saves development time, but it can be dangerous when used improperly.

Another unique feature is Blaze’s SRL (Structured Rule Language), which enables the use of regular expressions. In SRL the user can find string matches and submatches, create strings from those matches, split strings, etc. It’s also good for data validation problems such as ensuring proper credit card numbers.

And yet another unique feature of Blaze Advisor is the “when changed” operator that only fires when an attribute of an object changes. A business analyst might use it to watch for any important issue, such as a thermostat warning in a process plant or a particular stock reaching a certain price or volume.