Jess: The Rete Algorithm At Work

The last time I mentioned Sandia National Labs, I took a thumping from readers who either didn't agree with my minor point regarding the government giving back to taxpayers by releasing software such as the Acro 1.0 optimization toolkit, or were irritated by my clumsey sentence structure. So just to prove that my head is harder than their slings, arrows, and barbs, I'll take another run at it.

Sandia National Labs has released for licensing Jess 7.0, a rule engine that lets you embed intelligence in the form of business rules directly into Java applications. Jess 7.0 includes new tools, improved features, and enhanced performance for managing and controlling business rules in an enterprise environment. Among Jess’s new features is an Eclipse-based IDE for rules that supposedly increases programmer productivity and enhances collaboration.
Jess supports the JSR94 Java Rule Engine API as well as its own interface. Jess executes rules written both in its own expressive rule language and in XML.

"Programming with rules allows software to express real-world concepts in a natural, expressive way that helps business and IT professionals collaborate in bringing enterprise applications to life," said Craig Smith, software licensing manager at Sandia.

Jess uses an enhanced version of the Rete matching algorithm to process rules. Jess supports backwards chaining and working memory queries, and can directly manipulate and reason about Java objects. Jess provides a Java scripting environment that lets you Java objects, call Java methods, and implement Java interfaces without compiling any Java code.

And since Jess isn't freely available, I'm off the hook. Still, I wouldn't mind hearing from anyone who has used Jess.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:36 PM  Permalink