Open source rules engine with decent interface for writing rules

Question

I'm trying to locate an open source business rules engine that has a decent interface for building the rules.

OR at least one that works well on the .Net platform and has been updated sometime in the past 12 months.

Thanks,

Almazan

Answer 1

NxBRE is one option.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nxbre/#item3rd-5

Hermaphrodite

Answer 2

.NET Application Block for Validation and Business Rules

Zing

Answer 3

You can use Reaction RuleML. The Rule Manager from Acumen Business has an adapter for business users to generate a valid RuleML document

Anaxagoras

@BozoJoe: The information on their site looks good, but I can't figure out how much it is, whether they have an open source version, or even how I'd go about buying it. I think they really need to work on their site. – Almazan

Chris, the RuleML adapter is free (but not open source). Only the Biztalk Adapter and Windows Workflow Adapter need a license. I was trying to make the adapter module open source. But got stuck in a .net 4.0 upgrade. That triggered so many changes that the next release is taking much longer. The 4.0 was required to interface with BizTalk 2010 :( – Anaxagoras

Answer 4

Modern alternatives seem to be:

• Microsoft's own RuleEngine, which seems to be built upon a JSON rule definition including third-party (wed) editors
• NRules seems to be flexible and powerful, but JSON serialization is only possible through a module and looks, from a first glance, less readable than RuleEngine

Here is a blog post comparing these, including comparing to a self-written RuleEngine.

(copied from here)

Oneill

Answer 5

I'm going to throw one more piece of software I ran across: ncalc.

It's not exactly a "rules" engine; but it does do dynamic calculations where you can give it the expression to evaluate and all of the variables necessary. This was pretty much exactly all I needed for the app I was working on.

For a simple engine it works just fine. As far as an interface, it wasn't that complicated to build a few pages to let people type in the expressions.

For more complicated things, NxBRE is a better option; as @Kevin Dente answered above.

Almazan