OpenL Tablets is an open source business rules engine (BRE/BRMS) and decision management system. It consists of the following major components:

  • Business Rules Engine — powerful and business-friendly
  • OpenL Studio — web-based rules editing and management environment
  • Rule Services — framework and application to execute rules as services, such as RESTful services, Kafka consumer/producer, and implementation provider for Java interfaces
  • Rules Repository — an enterprise-class rules repository implementation using Git, databases, and blob storage

Approach

OpenL Tablets provides an unorthodox approach to writing and managing business rules that allows users to keep executable business rules as close as possible to the original source. At the same time, it features a highly scalable, executable rules engine, integration with modern software systems, and a choice of web-based or Excel-based authoring environments.

Business rules and policies most frequently exist as an unstructured set of Excel and Word documents. There are two very important characteristics of these documents:

  1. They reflect as closely as possible the intent of business users. We see numerous examples of high-quality documents created by business people for business people. This is their “business speak” — the world where they are comfortable and proficient.

  2. Unfortunately, these documents are not suitable for automatic or semi-automatic generation of executable business logic. The common approach is to invite a group of business analysts to transform these documents so that the business logic becomes understandable to software developers.

The result is usually a “scrambled eggs syndrome” — the produced software bears no resemblance to the initial business user’s intent. Furthermore, beyond a certain level of complexity, such software becomes an unmanaged mess with a high cost of ownership and support.

Does OpenL Tablets provide a silver bullet against all of these problems? Probably not. But we hope to get closer to it. Each release aims to introduce more features to make rules easier to use by business people. Our goal is to allow all rules maintenance without technical involvement.

Turning your documents into executable business rules is now simplified. You need to instruct OpenL how to process your documents by adding headers to all your tables that describe business rules, and converting your text rule descriptions into structured rule tables. Once done, all those rules are ready to be used in the OpenL Tablets environment. See the OpenL Tablets Documentation to find out how it’s done.

Summary

OpenL Tablets is a good approach for real-world business applications for several reasons:

  • 90–95 percent of business logic is table-based
  • Most of it is already maintained in Excel files
  • Business logic is primarily expressed in decision, lookup, or spreadsheet tables, providing a simplified way to apply business algorithms

OpenL Tablets is based on the belief that structured, graphically presented documents are easier to understand and change than business rules presented as plain text.