Recently I sat down to work up a solution around a rules engine. There were a few things I noticed right off.

1. When there is a request to implement or build a rules engine it is very often (I’m guessing a solid 40-60% of the time) reasoned that there is a need solely based on a lack of understanding around what the problem space is that actually needs a solution. The simple assumption, is 40-60% of the time somebody says “let’s implement a rules engine to solve these unknown problems” really translates to “we really don’t know much about this domain so let’s implement something arbitrary as a stop gap”.
2. Implementing a business rules engine can quickly become a “support the user” scenario for the developers that implement the rules engine. This is a situation in which the developers actually have to help the people writing the rules to be processed. This is not an ideal situation at all, generally developers supporting users writing rules is a quick way to ensure burn out, misappropriation of skills and turnover.
3. Many developers will, without hesitation, spout out “are you sure you want to implement a rules engine?” and then follow that up with “let’s discuss your actual problem” with that leading to “are you sure you want to implement a rules engine?”. Other developers upon hearing that one will implement a rules engine immediately respond with, “shit, I’m out.”

At this point I realized I had X, Y and Z reason to use it and would just have to persevere with all of the threats that are inclusive of implementing a rules engine. Sometimes one just has to step into the realm of scary and get it done.

So here’s what I dug up. I’m really not sure about the name of this project, as it appears to be some sort of odd usage, so whatever, but it is indeed called nools (github repo). Nools is a business rules engine based on the Rete Algorithm, something that is helpful to read up on when implementing. The main deployment for nools is to a Node.js server, but I’ve read that it is prospectively deployable in most browsers too.
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