Express
Made for small-scale decision solutions, the Express® version covers the entire lifecycle of a decision service in one environment.
Intended for noncritical rule applications, Express includes all the components for creating a decision service, developing it collaboratively, and running it for a client application. Unlike the full version, Express does not include separate environments that are dedicated to integration testing and production applications.
Introduction
Use Express to develop rule applications that have fewer than 500 artifacts and do fewer than a million executions per month. They address simple problems such as input validation and project assignment. These applications do not do the complex, load-heavy decision work found in, for example, loan processing or order management.
Express is similar to the development environment in the full version. The functionality of the components is the same as the functionality of the components in the full version.
Express includes the user roles and permissions of the full version. However, every user has all the permissions in Express. The roles and permissions are included to facilitate migration to the full version, where they control user access.
Client applications can use the execution server in the Express environment. However, it is better to keep development and production in separate environments. The execution servers in the full version meet the specific development, testing, and production demands of rule applications.
Express is fully provisioned by IBM®, and includes the following components:
- Rule Designer
- You use Rule Designer to create decision services. Based on Eclipse, Rule Designer comes with features for designing and assembling decision services. You start in Rule Designer, and typically publish decision services to Decision Center for final development.
- Decision Center Business console
- You work with colleagues to fully develop and maintain decision services in the Business console. This component includes testing and simulation features to validate rules, and the decision governance framework for managing projects.
- Rule Execution Server console
- You test and run rulesets from decision services in Rule Execution Server as part of the development process. When completed, the rulesets can be used by production client applications. Both development and production share this execution server.
Comparison
Express is the small-solution version. If your development needs change, you can upgrade easily from Express to the full version with minimal changes to your existing projects.
The following table compares the two offerings by feature:
| Feature | Express | Full version |
|---|---|---|
| Decision service creation and development | Yes | Yes |
| Online collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| User access security | Yes | Yes |
| Number of users | Limited (5 concurrent users) | Depends on the conditions of the subscription |
| Workflow governance | Yes | Yes |
| System/environments | 1 | 3 |
| Role-based access permissions | No | Yes |
| Production workload | Limited (1 million executions per month) | Very high (licensed in units of 1 million executions) |
| Number of rules | Performance reduced above 100 | High |
| Amount of data | Limited (500 artifacts) | High |
| High availability | No | Yes |
| Service availability guaranty | None | 99.93% |
Cloud Services terms
For the Cloud Services terms for Express, see Service Description for Express.