Aiding the Development of Active Applications: A Decoupled Rule Management Solution

Abstract

Active applications are characterized by the need for expressing, evaluating, and maintaining a set of rules that implement the application’s active behavior. Typically, rules follow the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) paradigm, yet oftentimes their actual implementation is buried in the application code, as their enactment requires a tight integration with the concepts and modules of the application. This chapter proposes a rule management system that allows developers to easily expand its rule processing logic with such concepts and modules and, hence, to decouple the management of their active rules from the application code. This system derives from an exception manager that has previously been developed in the context of an industry-scale workflow management system and effectively allows developers to separate active and non-active design concerns.