Drools for Complex Display Value Lookup

Question

The purpose of this quetion is to evaluate the reasonability of using Drools for complex display value lookup processing within a web application. I have been tasked to retrieve coverage information (from an insurance policy) stored in a vendor database and display the information within a custom web app. There are 100s of coverages and the display values that are to be displayed for each coverage can be based on a combination of 4 or 5 different columns per type of coverage. I think there may be as many as 40 different types of coverages.

So with that being said, would drools or a decision tree mechanism provide a good way of handling this? I should point out that it is very likely that we'll need to add / modify the coverage information often and one thing that draws me to this mechanism is that the BAs could help keep the rules up-to-date. I am worried however that the speed may be adversely impacted by this option. Currently I have a working protototype using databases in combination with reflection and XML in the the database to make sure the mapping is done successfully.

I am open to other options if you can think of them as well.

Thanks, Jeremy

Answer 1

Based solely on the fact that you want to offer BAs the possibility to dynamically update the coverage rules, it seems that Drools would offer you a big head start.

Regarding performance, it seems very unlikely to me that the performance would be an issue, as you're talking about a small number of facts and rules really. Biggest performance penalty is usually the parsing of the rules, which can be done on start-up and cached/shared afterward.