RuleLab.Net Online Service

ASP solution at www.rulelab.net

 

Make VDE Technologies, LLC your Business Rules Management System (BRMS) service provider. Our main product - RuleLab.Net - arms you with the online tools for designing, maintaining and implementing your business rules through this web site. You will be able to build, test, manage and execute the Rules against your data. Your Rules will be stored in the online repository, in the SQL Server database. Your company will have an administrator login and optional additional logins for managing your Rules in a shared environment. Your Rule files and other supporting files will be stored in an XML format. They can always be downloaded to your local box. You will have an ability to execute the Rules through the Web Service or locally through the downloadable Business Rules Engine (BRE) component.

 

  

What you receive with your paid Service Subscription

 

 

You will be provided with an administrator login that will give you an ability to execute every function of the RuleLab.Net service as well as handle the Account and renew Service Subscription. An administrator has an option of adding user accounts with limited access to the RuleLab.Net projects. Options vary from creating low level rule building blocks (Atoms and Facts) to managing the rules to just browsing the information. Your admin login also enables Web Service BRE request authentication

 

Customer Support

 

The Support is available via Email and by phone. Technical, billing and general questions should be submitted to VDE Technologies LLC Support email address. The email link to the Support can be found in the Rules Designer navigation bar once you login. The Support is available Monday through Friday 8:00AM to 6:00PM EST. We will do our best to address every issue as soon as possible but we would like to reserve up to 24 hours to respond.

 

Phone support is available for resolving critical problems associated with the Rules Designer and Web Service accessibility. Please email us to request the support phone number.

 

We recommend that your team designates a person for contacting VDE Technologies with any questions team members might have.

 

Availability and Maintenance 

 

The Rules Designer and the Web Service are available 24/7. System maintenance is performed on weekends and after 8:00PM EST on weekdays. During maintenance the RuleLab.Net may be unavailable for a few seconds. If we have to bring the system down for a prolonged period of time we will send email notifications at least 24 hours in advance.

 

Software Requirements

 

 

Integration with RuleLab.Net BRE can be implemented either locally through the BRE Component or online via the Web Service. You should be able to interface with the BRE using any Microsoft Windows XP development platform that supports managed assemblies/COM and XML. Other platforms can use SOAP protocol to interface with the BRE via the RuleLab.Net Web Service.

 

If your system is built on a non-Windows platform and you do not support SOAP, please consider running your BRE integration wrapper on a standalone Windows XP machine. You would have to write data adaptor to export data into XML and utilize the BRE on file level (see “RuleLabBREClient” console sample). The following requirements would still apply to your BRE machine.

 

Requirements for the local BRE integration:

·        Windows XP, Windows Server 2000 or Windows Server 2003

·        Microsoft.NET Framework 1.1

·        Visual Studio.Net or similar if you are planning on using the BRE assembly in a managed environment

·        COM support if you are not using a managed environment

·        XML document parser

 

Requirements for the Web Service integration:

·        Visual Studio.Net or another development package that supports SOAP 1.1

·        XML document parser

 

We recommend Microsoft Visual Studio.Net 2003 or 2005. Interfacing with the RuleLab.Net via the BRE assembly or the Web Service is seamless if you are using the Visual Studio.Net.

 

Required Skills

 

RuleLab.Net service has to be integrated with your existing application which requires analysis and development. RuleLab.Net is intended for teams with working knowledge of programming language(s) and XML. You will have to have all development software required for the integration.

 

If you are a small company with the IT consisting of just one programmer, don’t let it stop you from using our product. Recent advance in development environments allow small teams accomplish goals never possible before. With a fairly small effort, you can turn your business software into a rule based system. Even if you don’t use XML at this time, taking advantage of this standard is not hard. Your initial requirements may call for a very limited use of XML that will be easy to apply.

 

System Performance

 

1000 Rules under 1 second

 

As a benchmark of the BRE performance, we used the test case built on top of  the TravelReservation demo project. We generated over 1000 rules by copying a number of different Rules targeted by the data sample. The Rules included calculation formulas. Data was selected so that each of the auto-generated rules was evaluated during the BRE pass. Testing was performed using the Web Service integration method. We measured time it took to load all applicable objects from the database on the server side, validate the client data, execute the BRE and generate the response. It is the same metric that is returned by the BRE in the msTotalProcessingTime field of the State XML document. The total time it took to process a client request by the RuleLab.Net Web Service was consistently under one second.

 

While the BRE can parse 1000 rules and more within a reasonable time frame, the Rules Designer is not intended for browsing of so many rules in a single list. Depending on the Rules context, loading 1000 Rules into the Browser may easily generate over 1 megabyte of HTTP response data which will be slow to load and may consume bandwidth beyond acceptable levels. You would also find it cumbersome and unproductive to work with a list of too many business Rules. Therefore, we advise using the File Includes feature for merging your Rule files at runtime so that individual Rule files do not generate more than 200KB of the Rules Browser output. RuleLab.Net staff monitors the web traffic to the site and will advise if your Rules files are getting too large.

 

The Rules Designer has been optimized to offer high performance to its online users. We constantly monitor the timing of various Rules Designer functions on our server. The actual response time depends on your geographic location in relation to Los Angeles, CA where RuleLab.Net is hosted. Normally, once a demo project is fully loaded, it should not take more than 2 to 4 seconds to navigate between the Rules List and the Rule Editor. Of course the actual server processing time is a small fraction of that. If running the RuleLab.Net demo is making an impression of a slow application, there might be a problem within the connection between your ISP and our host. We would appreciate if you advice us of the issue so that it could be addressed with the hosting company and/or your ISP.

 

Workflow

 

First, your developers will have to come up with the XML template/schema that contains your application data linkable with RuleLab.Net formats. This can be as simple as a flat list of XML tags. The foundation of all your RuleLab.Net projects will be the data References – XML paths to your document nodes. At the same time, business users will need to work out the type of rules they want to build.

 

Once an account has been created, an administrator can start adding the Project files - References, Atoms, Facts and Rules. This account will be shared by other team members who will be able to login, review and modify the content. Upon creating the first project, an integrator can start working on interfacing with the BRE Web Service or the local BRE. Both the Rule building and the integration process will then continue until the application is ready for deployment.

 

Your production environment can access the Rules online via the Web Service BRE or locally via the BRE component and downloadable XML Rule Project files. If your implementation model relies on the Rule XML files stored in the online repository, you can have an immediate system response to the Rule changes, i.e. if you modify a Rule with the Rule Designer you can deploy your changes instantly. If on the other hand you prefer to use the BRE Component locally, you will need to either utilize the File Download Web Service methods or have a designated person download the affected Project file(s) and copy them over to your production environment.

 

Rules Designer requires your XML project files to be present in the online repository. You can download/upload your files as often as you like. Although not recommended, you can update the XML project files locally. If you prefer to keep and utilize files offline, you can erase them from the repository and only upload when you need to edit them.

 

 

Ownership

 

Your company will retain the full ownership rights to

-         XML References, Atoms, Facts, and Rules files created in your account

-         XML tests entered into the RuleLab.Net test screens

-         Your application XML files uploaded to the RuleLab.Net Rules Designer

-         Your RuleLab.Net Project infrastructure

-         XML and other data generated by the Rules Designer in response to the commands executed against your project files

-         All input and output objects of the Web Service calls

 

VDE Technologies, LLC will retain full ownership rights to

-         RuleLab.Net software running online and downloaded from the RuleLab.Net web site

-         RuleLab.Net documentation, screen layouts, web graphics, online demos and code samples

-         Contact and other information entered through Registration and Account management screens

 

Privacy

 

We keep your company contact information confidential. Company information is stored in the online database in an encrypted format. We will not share your contact information with anyone outside the company unless you give us an explicit permission to use your name for reference. For more details please see our privacy policy.

 

Security

 

RuleLab.Net Web site runs under the SSL which protects the communication with both the Rules Designer and the Web Service.

 

Optionally, you may have all your RuleLab.Net online project content encrypted using the key that you generate. The encryption converts all your XML Reference, Atom, Fact and Rule XML files into unreadable streams. This way you will be protected from a potential intellectual property loss if someone gains an unauthorized access to the database. Your private key will be transmitted via a cookie which itself is encrypted. You will have it written down and enter it if prompted by the system. If you erase your cookies and loose notes with your key number, we may not be able to recover your data. As always, to protect yourself from this and other potential catastrophe, please always download and backup your updated project files.

 

We at VDE Technologies LLC are only interested in providing the best service for your Business Rules Management needs. Unless you ask us for an advice or require a consulting, we will not be looking into your online project files.

 

Service Limitations

 

The Rules Designer should only be accessed manually. No automated high volume requests are allowed to any of the Rules Designer pages.

 

The following limits should be used as general guidelines rather than brick walls. If your company solution utilizes more bandwidth than we can offer then we may have to work with you to find a way to reduce the amount of traffic.

 

Bandwidth and database usage limitation per account (administrator Login ID):

 

  1. Maximum HTML page size returned by the Rules Designer should be less than 350K. This would allow for a rough estimate of 300 rules within a single rules list.
  2. An average amount of Rules Designer user requests (clicks) should not exceed one per minute or 15,000 monthly. This assumes that the rule building is a slow creative process and not just data entry. When entering predefined rules you might be hitting the system more frequently than once per minute but it is unlikely you would be doing it all month long.
  3. The total amount of XML data passed through the Web Service interface should not be greater than 100Mb per day. With XML Rules documents pulled from the Server database, your application can make several thousand Web Service calls per day. If, however, you are going to submit large XML Rules documents to the Web Service with every call then your daily amount of calls should be fewer. We encourage you to pull all XML project files from the online repository.
  4. We normally allow several Web Service calls per minute. Multi-pass BRE session qualifies as a single call. Web Service should never be called more often than once per second on a continued basis.
  5. The total amount of XML content data stored in the online repository should not exceed 20Mb.

 

The volume of RuleLab.Net BRE Web Service requests is not unlimited. Our service is targeted towards medium volume customers with a RuleLab.Net transaction occurring few times per minute. If you are planning to use our service for processing transactional data with a much higher degree of request frequency, you will most likely run into one of the above limitations. We will do our best to support your needs if you explain your dataflow to us.

 

If your business model and/or volume of data processing exceed the limits, we may have to obtain additional hosting to accommodate your business requirements. In this case we may suggest Service price increase due to the additional hosting and maintenance costs on our part.

 

Depending on the size of data you send and the frequency of Web Service calls, we may have to lease additional hosting resources so that our servers could keep up with your volume peaks without affecting other users. This too may require the price increase.

  

Consulting

 

Rulelab.Net is an open system. Should you require additional predicates or other features, please talk to us. We are available for consulting. If you need help with the integration and/or analysis of your Business Rule requirements, please contact us with specific details.

 

Policies

 

Service Terms and Conditions and Software Licensing agreements contains very important information regarding the Web Service and BRE Component licenses. Please read them both before subscribing to the RuleLab.Net service.

 

What would you like to do next?

 

Learn more about the RuleLab.Net system architecture

managing RuleLab.Net projects.

security of the online content

 

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