Rules Engines
What?
Instead of the usual imperative model, which consists of commands in sequence with conditionals and loops, a rules engine is based on a Production Rule System.
This is a set of production rules, each of which has a condition and an action - simplistically you can think of it as a bunch of if-then statements.
The subtlety is that rules can be written in any order, the engine decides when to evaluate them using whatever order makes sense for it.
A good way of thinking of it is that the system runs through all the rules, picks the ones for which the condition is true, and then evaluates the corresponding actions.
How?
You can build a simple rules engine yourself. All you need is to create a bunch of objects with conditions and actions, store them in a collection, and run through them to evaluate the conditions and execute the actions.
Libraries
Last updated