WSO2 today announced the launch of the WSO2 Business Rules Server (WSO2 BRS) for rapidly and easily creating, accessing, and managing business rules within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). For IT professionals, WSO2 BRS delivers an effective solution for separating business logic—which needs to be changed and evolved more rapidly, from the infrastructure code—and bringing rules into the well-defined management and governance practices developed for SOA. For business analysts, WSO2 BRS allows business rules to be encapsulated in more accessible forms, ensuring that rules are accurate and current reflections of the business needs.
Based on the popular open source Drools business rules management system (BRMS), WSO2 BRS provides proven performance and reliability. With WSO2 BRS, Drools developers have a simple and straightforward way to integrate rules with their SOA implementations.
WSO2 BRS is the newest addition to WSO2 Carbon, the award-winning, open source middleware platform, which uses the highly regarded OSGi framework to provide a flexible, modular architecture. By adding the rule functionality of WSO2 BRS, rules become a first-class component of the complete WSO2 Carbon platform. As a result, many SOA patterns can benefit from rules, for example:
Incorporating rule-based logic into workflows run by the WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS).
Using rule-based message mediation within the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB).
Augmenting a goverance scheme with rules using the WSO2 Governance Registry.
Targeting and filtering alerts within the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (BAM) using rules.
Implementing Web services by a rule set.
Like all WSO2 middleware products, WSO2 BRS runs on the common Carbon framework, which provides enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing—along with support for both on-premise and cloud deployments.
“Rules are becoming an increasingly popular part of the enterprise application toolbox, and a vital part of realizing the promises of agility and efficiency of service-oriented architectures,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and CEO of WSO2. “With the addition of the WSO2 Business Rules Server to our WSO2 Carbon platform, IT and business users can work even more effectively together to build and maintain competitive advantage in their industries.”
WSO2 BRS Features
WSO2 BRS provides a smooth process for exposing rules as services within an SOA. Key features include:
Wizard interface for easily exposing a rule as a service.
Management console, which makes all WSO2 Carbon service management features available for rule services.
Standard SOA interoperability and Quality of Service (QoS), including secure, reliable WS-* and REST services.
Rule repository based on WSO2 Registry, including versioning and rollback, governance, and lifecycle management.
Web 2.0 community features, including the ability to share, tag, comment on, and rate rules.
Pluggable rule engines based on the JSR-94 rule engine API standard, with the popular Drools engine provided as the default.
Availability and Support
The WSO2 Business Rules Server is available today as a software download and as a WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machine running on either the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) or VMware ESX. In Q3 2010, it also will be offered as a service running within the WSO2 Stratos platform-as-a-service. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, WSO2 BRS does not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of additional service and support options, including evaluation support, the QuickStartTM consulting program, development support, and production support.
About WSO2
WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit http://wso2.com and the WSO2 developer portal at http://wso2.org, or check out WSO2 on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Planet WSO2, and FriendFeed
