Jacob Feldman
OpenRules - CTO

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Dr. Jacob Feldman is a founder and CTO of OpenRules, Inc., a NJ corporation that created and maintains the popular Open Source Business Decision Management System commonly known as "OpenRules".  He has extensive experience in
development of decision support software using Business Rules, Optimization, and
Machine Learning technologies for real-world mission-critical applications.  He has 5 granted patents in the area of Business Rules and Constraint Programming.
 
Jacob is a frequent presenter at the major decision management
events. He is also a specification lead for the JSR-331 standard.

@Jacob_OpenRules
There is a well-known difference between a domain-specific language (DSL) and a general-purpose language (GPL):  while DSL is a programming language specialized to a particular application domain, any GPL is applicable across domains and lacks specialized features for a particular domain.

The modern Business Rules and Decision Management Systems (BRDMS) help users to move business logic from a code to business rules controlled by subject matter experts (not developers).  In a way, such systems replace a GPL for business users (not programmers).  However, the majority of these systems remain general-purpose systems that force their users to build specialized business rules for a particular domain from scratch. Alternatively, there are business rules products that work only in certain problem domains.

This presentation will share a real-world experience of building various domain-specific decisions and business rules using a general-purpose BRDMS “OpenRules”. While you may usually find solid Java libraries that support a domain-specific Java API, you cannot offer the proper API to your business users – they need some kind of a “business DSL”.  Actually, from a business perspective there should be no DSL (or any other “language”) at all. Instead, you need to offer a much more business friendlier interface such as specialized decision tables and other business constructs that are usually used by modern decision modeling techniques. Our approach to such a “business DSL” is based on development of domain-specific templates for decisions and business rules that utilize business concepts and decision variables for a particular domain (business glossary).

We will demonstrate how to convert domain-specific Java APIs to business-oriented decision modeling constructs using real-world use cases. In particular, we will present “business DSLs” for business decisions in the geospatial and job/resource scheduling domains.