My last word on the the 'FB buying Instagram' thing.
Moose!
· “Match”,” Antecedent” “Left Hand side”
o The ‘when’, how a rule is matched to the facts in working memory.
· “Consequence” or “Right Hand Side”
o What you want the rule to do... the ‘then’ side.
· “Production Memory”
o Where all the rules are kept
· “Working Memory”
o Where the facts are kept
· “Asserted” “Retracted”
o The insertion or removal of facts from working memory. Note that what rules are placed on the Agenda occurs when the facts are inserted.
· “Match – Resolve – Act” / “match, activate and fire”
o The cycle that the rule engine goes through repeatedly until all items on the agenda have been removed.
· “Conflict resolution”
o How the rule engine resolves the order in which to execute rules place on the agenda.
· “Salience”
o Emphasis, a way of indicating to the rules engine the precedence of rule firing.
· “Fired”
o The execution of a consequence
· “Activation/Activate”
o A rule which matches the facts is placed on the agenda
· “Agenda”
o An agenda is a table of Activations, it’s the list of the rules that will fire because the facts in working
So, you want to get up to speed on JBoss Drools, the open source rules engine.
Here's my list of resources, some of them are obvious, some take a bit more digging.
Official Documentation
The official documentation is the obvious starting point, its improved greatly over the years, but there are errors, usually relating to older APIs being used or incorrectly cut and paste code samples. If it doesn't make sense, search for corroberation
Mailing list
Join the User mailing list (don't pester the Dev list), even if you don't post, there are questions, and keeping an eye on the posts over time will definiately expand your understanding.
Examples
Drools has a set of examples available as stand alone projects, the examples in the documentation are often incomplete (Rule Templates and Excel Spreadsheets are one weakness) and these examples really help out. You'll currently find the examples in the downloads area.
Source code
Get the source code... no, really, go get it, you can't understand some error messages unless you have the code, so providing it to eclipse so you can follow the stack traces. In addition, the unit tests also provide usage examples, again it's in the downloads area.
Books
There are two books produced by Packt publishing which cover Drools from different directions.
Blogs
There are a couple of blogs about drools, and more one off articles on various aspects of drools.
Nightly builds
You can access the nightly builds of Drools from their Hudson CI environment. Since Drools often has a lengthy cycle of Milestones, this can often be useful to use.
Stack Overflow
Activity isn't massive, but it is still useful to post questions and answers
Webinar
Best practices in overview, about 80 percent vague, but 20 percent solid information.
Wiki
Somewhat out of date, but still interesting
