We have started an exciting new phase of Jetfire development. Our next release is planned to support both a rules engine and transparent access to .net objects.

Using Jetfire source code a rule will look like the following:

It needs to be mentioned that Jetfire code is not what the rule writer or rule user would see. They would, in all likelihood, see some sort of form based interface. Using Jetfire it extremely easy to write such an interface since it supports programmatically accessing the code for the rule. The Jetfire code is presented here for understandability.

How the rule code operates is that when an event occurs, in the above example when a 'property' is changed in any 'MailStats' object, parameters are generated for the rule. In the example above the 'mailStats' and 'user' parameters are extracted from the event parameters. Think of this as automatic method overloading. These parameters provide a context for the rule and naturally if a parameter was requested that didn't exist in the event object it would cause a coding error.

Any legitimate code is allowed within the 'condition', including calling other rules. Calling methods within a 'condition' is not allowed unless the method is deemed to be 'rule safe'. In other words helper methods are allowed such as converting from a string to integer. This allows the compiler to check the integrity of the rule 'condition' and insure that the 'when' events are sufficient.

Jetfire Policy Based Management Advantages

1. Jetfire rules are easy to code and understand. The built-in integrity features makes the rules very robust.
   
2. The ability to access .net objects means that Jetfire Rules can operate with existing data. That is there is no need to convert data. The data required for a Rule is in a database it can be easily accessed using a .net Framework such as ADO.
   
3. Since Jetfire is interpreted rules can be changed without recompilation or binding.
   
4. Code changes will not impact existing working rules since Jetfire includes automatic code version control.
   
5. Since Jetfire is a highly reflective language it is easy to present the user with friendly forms based rule system.