building rule-based applications

This isn't really WG business, but maybe one or more of you can help me.
I'm trying to understand the state of the art/industry in building
applications out of rules, most urgently for my talk at RuleML this
week, but also because I just want to understand it.

It seems to me a good way to build applications is with a 3-tier,
model-view-controller pattern, where the middle tier is pure rules, and
the "model" consists of those pure rules combined with some data store.

Does this actually work?  Is this what Business Rules systems do?  If
not, what's stopping them?  I guess in practice, some parts of the
business logic may be easier to write in Java, so the middle tier
becomes a mix of rules and Java...  but I'd hope the Java would be
driven by the rule engine, with people really just implementing pure
builtins and sometimes custom actions.

Any clues would be helpful.   :-)

   -- Sandro

Received on Saturday, 31 October 2009 13:57:52 UTC