Distributed Business Rules within Service-Centric Systems

Abstract

Business rules enable a clear separation of concerns between the core business knowledge and the underlying application code. Service-oriented Computing, on the other side, enables flexible software systems and provides support for business processes based on software services with well-defined interface, descriptions and communication protocols. Yet, the alignment of software services and business rules has not been addressed in literature. In this chapter we present the ViDRE system that bridges the gap between these two paradigms by exposing business rules as Web services. In contrast to existing rule engines, our approach supports distributed rule execution using meta-rules which includes automatic transformation of rules on both client- and server-side.