Is there an easy-to-use, free or inexpensive, web-based business rules app with a GUI?

Question

I am looking for a web-based business rules app that I can use with clients.

After I get them started, the client would be able to enter new rules.

Assume that the client has good Excel skills (as an example of level of tech sophistication) but has little patience for formal languages or programming.

Cost: $0-$500

The resulting models will NOT be executable.

Mindmaps are very useful, but the star configuration doesn't lend itself to flowchart-type applications.

BRML is much too technical, and requires the author to break down processes into page-sized chunks.

Example of a use case:

• A box of widgets arrives at the client office.

The user finds the section of the model for receiving a box.

Which vendor sent the box?

What does the user do with the contents of the box?

Which features of our back-end Web app have to be used to account for the new widgets?

The app will help the user find the answers to these questions.

If the answers are not there, the user can enter new rules into the app. This process must be simple enough that the business user sees the value of the effort in the short term, not as some big investment that might pay off far in the future.

Possible features:

• A decision-tree-like UI that the user can follow to find out what to do in a given situation.

• A search feature that allows the user to find a rule without following the tree.

• Expand/collapse so the user can see large, detailed sections of the tree as single units.

Does such an app currently exist?

Thanks very much in advance,

Adam Leffert

Answer 1

What you described sounds almost exactly like an expert system. I know there are several open source projects for setting up expert systems, and they are configurable to do as you have requested here.

Answer 2

I understand, but there are a few distinctions:

1) Expert systems estimate answers with variable degrees of certainty.

I need a system that proposes a finite set of recommendations, but each recommendation is 100% proposed by the system, because a user entered it as such.

E.g. in situation X, do Y.

It is up to the user to interpret the "X" correctly and decide when and where it applies.

I don't want a system that tries to infer suggestions from formalized rules.

2) The expert systems I've found cost tens of thousands of dollars or more.

3) I need a system that exists today, with a Web-based GUI, not a rules engine that I can spend thousands of hours building a GUI for.

Answer 3

How about Drools? It is mature and in use by many and backed by a big company. Update: and free.

It claims that "Drools is friendly to both developers and business users. DSLs allow developers to write almost natural language semantics for rule authors. GUIs and visual metaphors (RuleFlow, Decision tables in Spreadsheets) also reduce the gap between business and IT. A web based BRMS (Business Rule Management System) - called Guvnor - provides GUIs for managing rule assets."

The web based frontend called Guvnor is an "AJAX-based business rules management system (BRMS), built from the ground up for advanced rule authoring, version control, and management."

As a plus it is a rule engine and the content is executable. There is also a plugin for Eclipse.

The rules can look like:

rule "New Ticket"
 salience 10
 when
   customer : Customer( )
   ticket : Ticket( customer == customer, status == "New" )
 then
   System.out.println( "New : " + ticket );
end