Rule artifact management and deployment

Rule Execution Server provides a comprehensive set of tools to manage the deployment and execution of rulesets.

The Rule Execution Server console is a management tool designed for system administrators, developers, or business analysts to implement changes in business requirements quickly and easily. Such changes can be uploaded to the rule engine while the application is running.

Management

Rule Execution Server provides an environment for you to manage the deployment and execution of your rules on both Java™ SE and Java EE platforms. Rule Execution Server includes a set of management facilities. System administrators can use them to change the behavior of the execution stack and disable rulesets in emergency situations.

Note:

All managed entities are versioned.

The following table shows what management tasks are available in what environment.

Table 1. Management tasks
Entity Operations	Edited by
RuleApps
Create	Rule Execution Server console Rule Designer Decision Center Ant task API
Modify	Rule Execution Server console Decision Center Ant task API
Remove	Rule Execution Server console Ant task API
Get RuleApp Archive	Rule Execution Server console Ant task API
Rulesets
Create	Rule Execution Server console Rule Designer Decision Center Ant task API
Modify (change ruleset archives and properties)	Rule Execution Server console Decision Center Ant task API
Enable/Disable	Rule Execution Server console Decision Center API
Remove	Rule Execution Server console Ant task API
Server
Archive all RuleApps	Rule Execution Server console Ant task API
XOM resources (resuri)
Create	Rule Execution Server console Decision Center Ant task
Remove	Rule Execution Server console Ant task
Get resource	Rule Execution Server console
XOM resources (reslib)
Create	Rule Execution Server console Decision Center Ant task
Modify	Rule Execution Server console
Remove	Rule Execution Server console Ant task
Get library	Rule Execution Server console

Deployment

You can deploy and retrieve rulesets from the Rule Execution Server infrastructure in a number of ways. Use Apache Ant and JMX to automate deployment. See Managing RuleApps by using the MBeans accessor API and the ilog.rules.res.model.mbean package.

The following figure shows the tools that you can use to push rulesets from your development environment to Rule Execution Server. To prepare rules for deployment, you use RuleApp archives. Rule Execution Server can manage the archive from the meta-information that is provided in the RuleApp descriptor. The figure also shows the mechanisms to retrieve RuleApps that are deployed on Rule Execution Server. You can create either one archive for each RuleApp or a single archive that contains all the RuleApps deployed on Rule Execution Server. Smaller RuleApp archives with fewer rule artifacts use fewer resources and give better performance.

After you have installed Rule Execution Server and tested the execution of your rules, it might become clear that the default behavior of the execution stack requires some adjustment. The execution unit (XU) is packaged with a number of default values, but you can change its configuration properties in its deployment descriptor to meet the needs of your application and the execution context.