For the past few years I have been designing and building web services which make use of decision management technology such as Drools and FICO Blaze Advisor. The past year or so has all been about using Drools Guvnor to enable business users (legal and operations teams) manage rules, and using the Drools rules engine to evaluate trade requests against those rules.

My preference in setting up web services is to use the Spring Framework to configure my application and manage its various components. However, I struggled to find much information online about how best to wire up a Spring web application to make use of Drools for rules evaluation. The Drools documentation does include a chapter on Spring integration, but I found that it didn’t seem to make the integration any simpler, and forced dependencies on older versions of Spring that I didn’t want to use. In the end, I decided to hand-crank the integration in my application, and it turned out to be quite easy to do.

Continue reading “A web service powered by Spring and Drools” →