Drools & jBPM

Drools Pong hits home

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:24:00 +0000

This weekend I just finished the first cut for the class game Pong. The Wumpus World example I made was well received and the 20 minute YouTube video very populate, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CvjKqUOEzM. However I've since been asked for something a little simpler and smaller for a getting started example, so I thought I'd do Pong.

The initial cut was done with a single commit, so it's easy to see all the code in one place:
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/commit/2a8746a905efe1d9e0cc9f00eae06a50b76b214b

I'll follow up with a video soon, showing how it was made.

Natural Language, Tracking and Supply Chain Management With Drools

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:17:00 +0000

I often spend time trawling through google scholar and citeseer, always lots of gems to be found there. Here are three recent papers I thought worth highlighting that utlised Drools in an applied way.

A New Algorithm for the Acquisition of Knowledge from Scientific Literature in Specific Fields Based on Natural Language Comprehension
http://www.scirp.org/fileOperation/downLoad.aspx?path=IJIS20110200002_46860321.pdf&type=journal

PeerTrack: A Platform for Tracking and Tracing Objects in Large-Scaoe Traceability Networks
http://www.edbt.org/Proceedings/2012-Berlin/papers/edbt/a54-wu.pdf

Introducing a Rule-Based Architecture For WorkFlow Systems in Retail Supply Chain Management
http://bada.hb.se/bitstream/2320/10632/1/2011MAGI24.pdf

jBPM Designer version 2.1 released

noreply@blogger.com (Tihomir Surdilovic) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:41:00 +0000

We are happy to announce that we have released version 2.1 of the jBPM Designer. This is a big release which solves many issues we had in 2.0 as well as adds lots of new features. We are especially happy that jBPM Designer will also be included in the up-coming JBoss BRMS 5.3 release.

Here is a summary of what’s new and noteworthy in Designer 2.1 and we have also included a video below. Try it out and let us know what you think!

New and noteworthy

Numerous bug fixes. The number of commits for bug-fixes alone was over 100 between 2.0 and 2.1.
Increased performance for user interactions with the UI as well as loading time (JavaScript is now served compressed)
New features: Support for Reusable Subprocesses (Call Activities), Multiple Instance Subprocesses, and Data Objects
New feature: Support for Stencil set Perspectives. Allows you to specify a specific superset or a subset of supported BPMN2 nodes grouped in a named stencil set
New feature: New data input editors. We added specific user-friendly editors for Process variables, Globals, Imports, Task Data Inputs/Outputs/Assignments, Called Elements, etc
New Feature: Process dictionary support. Allows you to define your own process dictionary and use it inside your business processes.
New Feature: In-Line editing of Process and User Task forms. This new feature allows you to create/modify your process and task forms in-line which is great as you do not have to leave your modelling environment to perform this feature.
New Feature: Code highlighting and Code completion in Expression editors, code highlighting for process and task form editors and source views.
New Feature: Smart node deletion – deleting a node will also delete its incoming and outgoing connections unless they specify an expression
Support for both Drools Guvnor 5.3 and 5.4

Here is also a video for the Designer 2.1 release.

You can download this version from soureforge just like the previous ones. Simply replace your existing designer war with the new one. Make sure to clear our your browser cache before starting to use the new version.

As always your feedback is more than welcome. Hit us up on IRC if you would like to contribute to the jBPM Designer. Have fun!

Drools 5.4.0.CR1 released

noreply@blogger.com (Toni Rikkola) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:24:00 +0000

We're happy to announce the release of Drools (Expert, Fusion, Planner, Guvnor) 5.4.0.CR1.

Documentation, Release Notes and Downloads are detailed below:

Download the zips from the bottom of the drools download page.

To try out the examples, just unzip one and run a runExamples.sh/.bat script.

See the JBoss Maven repository for a list of all released artifacts.

It will be synced to Maven Central automatically in a couple of hours.

Read the new and noteworthy changes here.

Try it out and give us some feed-back (user list, issue tracker).

Plain old Java score calculation in Planner

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey De Smet) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:37:00 +0000

In Drools Planner 5.4.0.CR1, you can now define your score calculation in plain old Java too. In fact, it supports 3 alternative score calculations:

Simple Java score calculator (new in 5.4)
Incremental Java score calculator (new in 5.4)
Drools DRL score calculator (the traditional way)

Unfortunately, each of these have advantages and disadvantages. Let's take a look at each of them.

Simple Java score calculator

This score calculator is very easy to implement. Just implement one method:
For example for NQueens:
It's that easy.

Advantages

No learning curve: it's plain old Java
Can delegate score calculation to an existing codebase

This is especially interesting when you're migrating from a legacy system and want to avoid a big bang conversion.

Disadvantages

Slow and less scalable, because it does not do incremental score calculation.

Incremental Java score calculator

This score calculator is very fast and scalable, but also very hard to implement, because you have to implement incremental score calculation yourself. You need to implement a bunch of methods on IncrementalScoreCalculator to make this happen. Here's a part of one NQueens implementation:
The implementation above isn't that good. Do you see how to optimize it? There's a much faster way to implement the NQueens score calculator, using Maps to avoid having to iterate through the insertedQueenList, but it makes the code even harder to understand.

Advantages

Very fast and scalable

Currently the fastest if implemented correctly (see benchmarks below)

Disadvantages

Incremental (AKA delta) calculation is hard to write and to maintain
You have to design and write all the performance optimizations yourself.

Drools DRL score calculation

This is the traditional and recommended way to implement score constraints, as Drools rules in DRL:
Notice the absence of incremental code, because Drools Expert does that for you automatically.

Advantages

Incremental score calculation without the boilerplate code for it
Flexibility for your score rules:

Define them in a decision table (XLS or Guvnor WebUI)
Store your rules in the Guvor repository
Translate them to natural language with DSL

Explain the score of a solution:

Just iterate over the ConstraintOccurrence instances to explain to the user why that score was the result.

In every major and minor release, Drools Expert becomes faster. There are several notable features on the Drools Expert roadmap that will make the Drools Score Calculator much faster:

More JITting
Undo then
Set based propagation

Disadvantages:

You need to learn and use DRL

Benchmark results

Because the score of a solution is always the same, no matter how it's calculated, the only notable measurement is the calculation speed relative to the problem size.

All benchmarks have be done with a warmup (to avoid JIT and DRL complication delays).

NQueens score calculation

The results for 32, 64 and 256 queens:

Notice how the simple Java score calculator (red) does not scale at all. It starts out OK, but as the problem size gets bigger, it becomes very slow.

The drools calculator (in yellow - sorry that it's not very visible) starts slow on a trivial problem size, but scales up well. If we increase the number of queens even further, it will easily by-pass the basic incremental Java implementation. There's an well-known lesson to learn there: Don't let the performance results fool you into ignoring the scalability trend.

Notice the speed of the advanced incremental java score calculator (green), but don't forget that it's hard to write and to maintain the code behind it.

CloudBalance score calculation

This shows the results on 300, 600, 1200 and 2400 processes. The incremental Java score calculator also uses Maps extensively.

Notice that as the problem scales out, the Drools score calculator comes closer and closer to the hand-crafted incremental Java calculator.

Real problems

Both NQueens and CloudBalance are one of 4 toy examples, with only a few constraints. The 9 real examples have far more constraints (leaving more room for inter constraint optimization), so I suspect the benchmark results might be different there.

Prolog is Cool Again and Drools the DataBase

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:53:00 +0000

Rich Hickey has just done a interview at InfoQ on Datomic
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic

In his talk he highlights their adoption of DataLog for their query format, and a transition away from an SQL approach to a rule based approach. DataLog is a Prolog derivitive, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog. It's great to see Prolog and rule based systems for query capabilities getting more attention again.

We added Prolog like capabilities to Drools earlier this year, that provides both queries but also reactive materialised views:
http://blog.athico.com/2011/04/backward-chaining-emerges-in-drools.html

We are currently working on some proof of concepts around transactions and persistent data structures in Drools, along with OrientDB integration. So I hope we can see Drools the DataBase, via OrientBD integration before end of this summer.

GSOC Just 2 days left

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:24:00 +0000

If you want to suggest a project, or claim a project, you have just 2 days left to do so - HURRY UP!!!
https://community.jboss.org/wiki/GSoC12Ideas

Guvnor - Improved default value handling

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Anstis) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:14:00 +0000

Some things start simple.

Take the "Default Value Editor" for example. This simple editor provides the means to define a default value for columns' cell values for the Guided Decision Table editor. When a new row is inserted the cell assumes it's default value. Simple.

The Default Value Editor has always been a TextBox and it was time it was improved to be consistent with the new improved "typed" editors used through-out Guvnor (with CR1 looming more extensive enhancements take a back seat).

The requirement was simple: make the editor suitable for the data-type of the column.

After the first day of re-factoring it became apparent things were not going to be quite as simple as I'd hoped. Things needing consideration:-

If a "Value List" is provided, the default value needs to be one of the values in the list
If the column represents a field with an enumeration the default value must be one of the enumeration's members
If the column uses an operator that does not need a value (e.g. "is null") a default value cannot be provided
If the column field is a "dependent enumeration" the default value must be one of the permitted values based upon parent enumeration default values, if any.
Default values are not required for Limited Entry tables.
Default values always remain optional.
Default values can be defined in either the Guided Decision Table editor or the Guided Decision Table Wizard.

The changes are now complete and committed to github in time for the CR1 branch. If you use decision tables, if you use default values be sure to check it out before Final.

Setting the default value of a Date column

Setting the default value of a cell with a Value List

What started as a quick enhancement before CR1 turned out to be more extensive than expected.

Protege 3.5 Alpha released with Drools SWRLTab support

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 03:39:00 +0000

Thanks to Martin O'Connor, from Stanford, for implementing the Drools SWRLTab for Protege:
http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Protege_3.5_Alpha_Release_Notes
-----

We are pleased to announce Protege 3.5 alpha! The main focus of the 3.5 series is the SWRLTab's support of the Drools rule engine, thus providing a completely free and open source solution for executing SWRL rules in Protege-OWL.

Please contact us via one of the Protege 3 mailing lists with questions, feedback, and bug reports.
Download Protege 3.5 alpha from the main Protege website (new users, please register first).

Release Notes

The contents of the release notes section describe changes relative to Protege 3.4.8.

Build 643 -- March 23, 2012

The SWRLTab now supports the Drools rule engine.

A new tab called the SWRLDroolsTab provides a graphical interface for interacting with this implementation. The existing SWRLJessTab is still available. All existing SWRL built-in libraries are supported in the Drools implementation.

Both the Drools and Jess implementations now use a pair of OWL 2 RL-based reasoners for performing inference (read more). These reasoners are also used by the SQWRL query language.

The Java APIs provided by the SWRLTab have changed slightly so users of these APIs will need to update their code. Information on these changes can be found here. The process of building the SWRLTab and its associated rule engines has also changed. The new build process is outlined here.

Guvnor - Recent improvements

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Anstis) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Other than a sighting at the London BRMS 2012 event last week it would appear I have been somewhat quiet in recent weeks. This, it can be argued, is a good thing ;)

However I've just finished a couple of improvements to Guvnor for CR1 I thought it worth telling you about:-

Improved numeric data-type handling

To be honest, numerical data-types in Guvnor have not been supported that well in the past. The best you'd get, to edit such values, was a text box that had very limited restriction on what could be entered. This was largely because the heart of Guvnor used to drive most of the editors was only aware of a generic "numerical" type.

With a little bit of blood, sweat and tears this has now been improved to differentiate between all of Java's primitive numerical types (byte, short, integer, long, double and float) together with BigDecimal and BigInteger. When adding a numerical field to a rule you now get an editor relevant for the type with more strict validation.

DRL generation has subsequently been improved to ensure the distinction between numerical sub-types is rendered correctly (most notably the treatment of BigDecimal and BigInteger in the right-hand-side of a rule for Java or MVEL dialects).

MVEL DRL example

rule "brl"
dialect "mvel"
when
$c : Container( )
then
$c.setBi( 35352324242424242424I );
$c.setBd( 4343.3434344343B );
update( $c );
end

Java DRL example

rule "brl"
dialect "java"
when
$c : Container( )
then
$c.setBi( new java.math.BigInteger("35352324242424242424") );
$c.setBd( new java.math.BigDecimal("4343.3434344343") );
update( $c );
end

Dependent enumerations

Dependent enumerations are now available to the Web Guided Decision Table editor in Guvnor. A dependent enumeration is one whose values depend upon the value of another (parent) enumeration. Examples include Continent\Country\Region, Manufacturer\Product etc.

Dependent enumerations are available to both Extended Entry and Limited Entry tables; together with appropriate expansion when generating an expanded form table.

Dependent enumerations also function in the BRL Rule Editor and Rule Templates.

For those wanting to see dependent enumerations in action and can't wait for CR1 here's a quick video demonstrating them: The dependent enumerations are shown first, then a new expanded form decision table is generated before being edited.

A couple of regressions were noticed by a vigilant community user (thanks Nicolas Héron) and have been subsequently fixed. The changes for both enhancements have been extensive hence I would urge you to download and try CR1, when it becomes available, so anything else untoward can be squashed before 5.4.0.Final.

Enjoy.

RuleML2012 - The 6th International Symposium on Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:45:00 +0000

====================================================================*
* RuleML2012@ECAI - 6th International Symposium on Rules: *
* Research Based and Industry Focused *
* Montpellier, France, August 27-29, 2012. *
* http://2012.ruleml.org *
====================================================================*

The International Symposium on Rules, RuleML, has evolved from an annual series
of international workshops since 2002, international conferences in 2005 and
2006, and international symposia since 2007. This year the RuleML Symposium
will be held in conjunction with ECAI 2012, the 20th biennial European
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in Montpellier, France, August 27-29,
2012. RuleML 2012 will include the RuleML Challenge Prize which awards the best
two demos.

Topics
============================================
We invite high-quality submissions related to (but not limited to) one or more
of the following topics:

* Rules and Automated Reasoning
* Logic Programming and Non-monotonic Reasoning
* Int'l Conference track on Pragmatic Web
* Rule-Based Policies, Reputation and Trust
* Rule-based Event Processing and Reaction Rules
* Fuzzy Rules and Uncertainty
* Rule Transformation, Extraction and Learning
* Vocabularies, Ontologies, and Business rules
* Rules in online-market research and online marketing
* Rule Markup Languages and Rule Interchange
* General Rule Topics

Important Dates
============================================
Abstract submission: March 25, 2012
Paper submission: April 1, 2012
Notification of acceptance/rejection: May 20, 2012
Camera-ready copy due: June 10, 2012
RuleML-2012 dates: August 27-29, 2012

Satellite Events
============================================
The RuleML2012 Symposium is also hosting
* The 7th AIS SigPrag Int.'l Conference Track on Pragmatic Web
* The RuleML2012 Doctoral Consortium: http://2012.ruleml.org/phdconsortium
* The 6th International Rule Challenge: http://2012.ruleml.org/rulechallenge
* Face-to-Face LegalRuleML OASIS TC meeting: 29 August, 2012
============================================
Comments:
Posted By Prof. Dr. Adrian Paschke

Get ready for jBPM Web Designer 2.1!!

noreply@blogger.com (Tihomir Surdilovic) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:03:00 +0000

We are close to releasing a new version of the jBPM Web Designer. This version will include awesome new features and numerous bug fixes - read all about it here!

Drools & jBPM Event : London 8th March 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:33:00 +0000

Register now to join us for the free Drools & jBPM London 2012 event, hurry limited spaces :)
http://redhat-mail.com/t/XRU-OE4J-824IMOYW1D/cr.aspx

When Thursday 8th March
Where Ave Maria Lane, London, London EC4M 7DD (near St Paul's Tube)

	Agenda

09:00		Registration, tea and coffee

09:30		Introduction/ Welcome

09:45		Rules, Events & Processes: the Open Source way Mark Proctor - Worldwide Technical Lead for BRMS & BPMS, Red Hat

10:45		Decision Tables Michael Anstis, JBoss Core Developer, Red Hat

11:15		Tea/Coffee Break

11:30		BPMN2 and jBPM5 Kris Verlaenen, JBoss Core Developer, Red Hat

12:15		Solving Planning Problems Geoffrey de Smet, JBoss Core Developer, Red Hat

12:45		Case Studies

13:00		Lunch and Networking

Vehicle routing demo video

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey De Smet) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:17:00 +0000

What's the optimal way to supply all locations with their request items, using 6 vehicles with a capacity of 100 items each?

This example will be part of Planner 5.4.0.CR1 :)

Update (16-MAR-2012):

In the latest version, I've pimped the GUI a little bit to make it more clear what vehicle routing does:

Chained: the trick behind solving TSP and VRP in Planner with minimal code

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey De Smet) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:41:00 +0000

Starting from 5.4.0.CR1 (soon to be released), Planner will have chained support: a feature specifically designed to help solve Traveling Salesman and Vehicle Routing like problems with minimal code. It's compatible with all the other planner features (construction heuristics, metaheuristics, real-time planning, ...) and it replaces a ton boilerplate code I used to have in the TSP example.

From the documentation:

A planning variable that is chained either:

Directly points to a planning fact, which is called an anchor.
Points to another planning entity with the same planning variable, which recursively points to an anchor.

Here are some example of valid and invalid chains:

Every initialized planning entity is part of an open-ended chain that begins from an anchor. A valid model means that:

A chain is never a loop. The tail is always open.
Every chain always has exactly 1 anchor. The anchor is a problem fact, never a planning entity.
A chain is never a tree, it is always a line. Every anchor or planning entity has at most 1 trailing planning entity.
Every initialized planning entity is part of a chain.
An anchor with no planning entities pointing to it, is also considered a chain.

The optimization algorithms and build-in MoveFactory's do chain correction to guarantee that the model stays valid:

Stay tuned... Vehicle routing (with capacity limits) demo video coming soon :)

Build a Graphical Adventure Game in 20 minutes using JBoss Drools : All Hail the Wumpus

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:44:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CvjKqUOEzM

Today we take you on a 20 minute adventure. Building, almost from scratch, a complete graphical adventure game with Drools. The code will be part of the up coming Drools 5.4 release. The game is based on Wumpus World, from the book Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach.

All Hail the Wumpus

Please vote up on the dzone link at the bottom

For those wanting to try this now, you can use the latest snapshot build from hudson. It uses the new property specific extensions, so the examples cannot be run against older binaries.
https://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/drools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/drools-distribution/target/

Drools, jBPM and Guvnor : Measuring Risk via Community Health

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 02:10:00 +0000

When I give Open Source talks on the software we build, I always take a few minutes to talk about risk. Adopting any software technology brings about levels of risk that need to be assessed. Some aspects of risk are obvious; such as "is the product fit for purpose". This can normally be assessed via demonstrations, prototyping and fit gap analysis. Other aspects of risk are not so easy, "is this product healthy".

Let's stop a minute and think about the word "health" what does health mean in terms of software. If a project is not healthy any of the following, among many other things, could happen:

Bugs are slow to be fixed, or not fixed at all
Long time between releases with new features, or no releases at all.
Project is dormant, or worse abandoned but has not been stated publicly
Finding community support can be hard
End up maintaining the whole project yourself inhouse.
When a project is not moving forward fast enough, or the scope of the project is too small, required features might be implemented as hybrid extensions only (for example using a different license or even closed source), and not available as part of the open-source project

So when you are looking to adopt a technology how do you assess if it's healthy, how do you avoid situations detailed above:

Large development community
Regular commits
Large support community, either via real time chat or mailing lists
Is the project financially profitable already.
Published books?

If publishers are willing to invest in books, you know there is a large end user community. That means lower risk of bugs, and easier to hire people and find consultancies.

Commitment to public global speaking engagements, such as java user groups or workshops.

With Drools, jBPM and Guvnor there are published books, and you only have to pop onto irc or the mailing lists to see the vibrant chats going on. We continue to hire aggressively, with two more people starting within the next two months. More importantly though you only have to go to github to see the flurry of activity going on for a large number of developers. Below you can see the graphs taken from github, and I think they speak for themselves :)

Drools Commit Graph

jBPM Commit Graph

Guvnor Commit Graph

Employee rostering with Drools Planner: demo video

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey De Smet) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:11:00 +0000

Drools & jBPM Event : London 8th March 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 04:43:00 +0000

	Agenda

09:00		Registration, tea and coffee

09:30		Introduction/ Welcome

09:45		Rules, Events & Processes: the Open Source way Mark Proctor - Worldwide Technical Lead for BRMS & BPMS, Red Hat

10:45		Decision Tables Michael Anstis, JBoss Core Developer, Red Hat

11:15		Tea/Coffee Break

11:30		BPMN2 and jBPM5 Kris Verlaenen, JBoss Core Developer, Red Hat

12:15		Solving Planning Problems Geoffrey de Smet, JBoss Core Developer, Red Hat

12:45		Case Studies

13:00		Lunch and Networking

Webinar on jBPM 5 (February 22nd)

noreply@blogger.com (Kris Verlaenen) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:34:00 +0000

We're planning a new webinar on the latest features of jBPM 5 and a preview of some of the upcoming features this week. Register now !

jBPM 5: Redefined, Simplified, and the Open Source BPM

jBPM is one of the most popular open source BPM/workflow solutions on the market. Over the years it has been widely adopted by many enterprises due to its many unique characteristics, such as:

a lightweight footprint
an embeddable engine
its ease of use

jBPM 5 has taken these unique characteristics to the next level by adopting the popular BPMN 2 standard. BPMN 2 is not only the choice of standard for modeling, but also the choice for native execution.

jBPM 5 is a redefined BPM implementation that is further simplified for ease of use and offers flexibility in meeting wider enterprise needs. This webinar will discuss many of the key functionalities and future direction of jBPM 5, including:

BPMN 2 based process modeling using rich web based designer and Eclipse editor
Human interaction based on the WS-HT standard
Process monitoring and debugging
Support plan through JBoss’ enterprise product

You will also learn how to build adaptive business processes by leveraging the combined power of business rules, business events, and processes.

Speakers:

Prakash Aradhya, Sr. Product Manager, Red Hat
Prakash Aradhya is responsible for driving the product strategy and roadmap for JBoss Enterprise BRMS and BPM products. He has over 15 years of experience in product development and product management in the middleware software industry. Prior to his focus on the BRMS and BPM products, Prakash was responsible for JBoss Developer Platform product management which included JBoss Developer Studio. Prior to joining Red Hat, Prakash worked at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) as SOA Product Manager for the Sun Java CAPS product.

Kris Verlaenen, jBPM 5 Project Lead
Kris Verlaenen leads the jBPM 5 effort and is also one of the core developers of the Drools project, to which he started contributing in 2006. After finishing his PhD in Computer Science in 2008, he joined JBoss full-time and became the Drools Flow lead. He has a keen interest in the healthcare domain, one of the areas that have already shown to have a great need for a unified process, rule and event processing framework.

Choose from the following live events:
Time zone converter

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 | 14:00 UTC / 9am (New York) / 3pm (Paris) / 7:30pm (Mumbai)
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 | 19:00 UTC / 2pm (New York) / 8pm (Paris) / *Thur 12:30am (Mumbai)

Import XLS decision tables into Guvnor

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Anstis) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:43:00 +0000

Work has been completed to enable users to upload their XLS based Decision Tables into Guvnor! Checkout this new feature in the master branch (or wait for the arrival of 5.4.CR1 when it becomes available...)

Checkout a demo here.

Uploading a XLS decision table results in the creation of numerous new assets, including (obviously) web-guided Decision Tables, functions, declarative types and modifications to package globals and imports etc (Queries are not converted, although supported in the XLS form, as Guvnor doesn't support them yet).

XLS decision table

Guided decision table

This is the first stage of "round-tripping" decision tables. We still need to add the ability to export a guided decision table back to XLS, plus we'd like to add tighter integration of updated XLS assets to their original converted cousins - so if a new version of the XLS decision table is uploaded the related assets' versions are updated (rather than creating new) upon conversion.

This is a powerful enhancement and as such your feedback is critical to ensure we implement the feature as you'd like it to operate. Check it out, feedback your opinions and help guide the future work :)

DeveloperConference 2012 in Brno, Czech Republic 17 - 18 February 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey De Smet) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:12:00 +0000

Next week, on Friday 17 February, I 'll be presenting a introduction to Drools, Guvnor and Planner at the DeveloperConference 2012 in Brno, Czech Republic.

There are plenty of other interesting JBoss talks, about topics such as CDI, Arquillian Drone, Errai, Infinispan, Hibernate OGM, ... The entrance is free, so join us if you're in the neighborhood.

Drools & jBPM Info Sheet

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:55:00 +0000

We've made an Info Sheet that provides an overview of Drools, jBPM and Guvnor. Feel free to download it and hand it out in your public presentations. There are 13 pages in total. You'll need to sign in to slideshare to download. Big text and lots of pretty pictures and very sexy, but not to be used for "extra" curriculum activities ;)
http://www.slideshare.net/MarkProctor/drools-jbpm-info-sheet

Welcome Alexandre Porcelli

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:43:00 +0000

Alexandre Porcelli has joined the Drools&jBPM team today. Alexandre is an Antlr guru and also leads the Open Spotlight project, http://porcelli.github.com/OpenSpotLight/.

Alexendre will initially be helping out on the Guvnor work for jBPM, then in a few months time we hope that he'll lead our work around distributed computing.

Alexendre lives in sunny Brazil, you can read more about him here,http://porcelli.com.br/.

Wumpus World Lives!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Proctor) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:16:00 +0000

Wumpus world continues to improve and is now fully playable. The UI has a lot more polish now and nearly all of the code has been moved to DRL now, including the swing graphics rendering for the cave and the sensor panels. You'll need to use master head to try it. Java is just used to build the kbase from the drl files and to create the swing panels, buttons and forms. WindowBuilder was used to graphical layout things.

The final thing I have to do is allow for client integration, so that people can write rules to automate the hero.

https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/init.drl
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/commands.drl
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/collision.drl
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/score.drl
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/view/ui.drl
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/view/paintCave.drl
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/blob/master/drools-examples/src/main/resources/org/drools/examples/wumpus/view/paintSensor.drl

Cave is hidden, playing the game purely with Sensors.

Cave is now shown, but unvisited rooms are greyed out.

Cheating reveals all, I have shot the Wumpus Dead

Window Builder with MigLayout was used to create the panels, buttons and forms

Here is the code to incrementally render the cave rooms:

function void paintCaveCell(String image, Cell cell, GameView gv, GameUI gui) {
     int rowIndent = 20;
     int colIndent = 5;
     int rowPad = cell.getRow() * gv.getCellPadding();
     int colPad = cell.getCol() * gv.getCellPadding();
     int y = (4 - cell.getRow()) * 50 - rowPad + rowIndent;
     int x = cell.getCol() * 50 + colPad + colIndent;
     
     Graphics caveG = gui.getCavePanel().getCaveG();
     caveG.setColor( Color.WHITE ); // background
     caveG.fillRect( x, y,  gv.getCellWidth(), gv.getCellHeight() );
     caveG.drawImage( ImageIO.read( GameView.class.getResource( image ) ), x, y, gv.getCellHeight(), gv.getCellWidth(), gui.getCavePanel() );
}

rule "Init CaveDirty" when
    not CaveDirty()
then
    insert( new CaveDirty() );
end

rule "Create CompositeImage" when
    $c : Cell()
    not CompositeImageName( cell == $c )
then
    CompositeImageName cin = new CompositeImageName($c, "", "", "", "");
    insert( cin );
end  

rule "Reset CompositeImage" when
    $cin : CompositeImageName()
    not Cell( row == $cin.cell.row, col == $cin.cell.col)
then
    retract( $cin );
end    

rule "Base Paint" when
    $c : Cell()
    $cin : CompositeImageName( cell == $c );
then
end    

rule "Paint Gold" extends "Base Paint" when
    Gold(row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { gold = "gold" };
end

rule "Paint Empty Gold" extends "Base Paint" when
    not Gold(row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { gold = "" };
end

rule "Paint Pit" extends "Base Paint" when
    Pit(row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { pit = "pit" };
end

rule "Paint Empty Pit" extends "Base Paint" when
    not Pit(row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { pit = "" };
end

rule "Paint Wumpus Alive" extends "Base Paint" when
    Wumpus(alive == true, row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { wumpus = "wumpus_alive" };
end

rule "Paint Wumpus Dead" extends "Base Paint" when
    Wumpus(alive == false, row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { wumpus = "wumpus_dead" }
end

rule "Paint Empty Wumpus" extends "Base Paint" when
    not Wumpus(row == $c.row, col == $c.col)  
then
   modify( $cin ) { wumpus = "" }
end


rule "Paint Hero Direction Up" extends "Base Paint" when 
    $h : Hero( direction == Direction.UP, row == $c.row, col == $c.col )
then
     modify( $cin ) { hero = "hero_up" };
end    

rule "Paint Hero Direction Down" extends "Base Paint"  when
    $h : Hero( direction == Direction.DOWN, row == $c.row, col == $c.col  )
then
    modify( $cin ) { hero = "hero_down" };
end   

rule "Paint Hero Direction Left" extends "Base Paint"  when
    $h : Hero( direction == Direction.LEFT, row == $c.row, col == $c.col  )
then
    modify( $cin ) { hero = "hero_left" };
end    

rule "Paint Hero Direction Right" extends "Base Paint" when
    $h : Hero( direction == Direction.RIGHT, row == $c.row, col == $c.col  )
then
    modify( $cin ) { hero = "hero_right" };
end 

rule "Paint Empty Hero" extends "Base Paint" when
    not Hero( row == $c.row, col == $c.col  )
then
    modify( $cin ) { hero = "" };
end   

rule "Paint Hidden Room" when 
    $gui : GameUI( cavePanel != null && cavePanel.caveG != null  )
    $cd : CaveDirty() @watch(!*)
    $gv : GameView(showAllCells == false)
    $c : Cell(hidden == true) 
then
   paintCaveCell( "hidden_room.png", $c, $gv, $gui);
   modify( $cd ) { dirty = true };
end


rule "Paint Empty Room" when 
   $gui : GameUI( cavePanel != null && cavePanel.caveG != null )
    $cd : CaveDirty() @watch(!*)   
   ($gv : GameView(showAllCells == true) and $c : Cell() ) or
   ($gv : GameView(showAllCells == false) and $c : Cell(hidden == false) )      
   CompositeImageName( cell == $c, pit == "", wumpus == "", gold == "", hero == "" ) @watch(*)
then
   paintCaveCell( "empty_room.png", $c, $gv, $gui );
   modify( $cd ) { dirty = true };
end 

rule "Paint Non Empty Room" when
   $gui : GameUI( cavePanel != null && cavePanel.caveG != null )
   $cd : CaveDirty() @watch(!*)   
   ($gv : GameView(showAllCells == true) and $c : Cell() ) or
   ($gv : GameView(showAllCells == false) and $c : Cell(hidden == false) )    
   $cin : CompositeImageName( cell == $c, ( !(hero != "" && pit != "")  &&  // don't draw a hero on the same square as a pit or an alive wumpus, as the game is over
                                            !(hero != "" && wumpus == "wumpus_alive") && 
                                            !(pit == "" && wumpus == "" && gold == "" && hero == "") ) ) @watch(*)
then
    paintCaveCell( $cin.pit + $cin.wumpus + $cin.gold +  $cin.hero + ".png", $cin.cell, $gv, $gui );
    modify( $cd ) { dirty = true };
end

rule "Redraw Cave" no-loop salience -500 when
   $gui : GameUI() 
   $cd : CaveDirty( dirty == true )
then
   $gui.updateCave();
   modify( $cd ) { dirty = false };
end