Web Site Business Logic Manager
Design and apply business rules directly to your web site. The rules will drive your site offering visitors an experience of interacting with an online software application. Our web-based Rules Designer, server-side Business Rules Engine, and the client-side AJAX-based script allow you to add powerful business logic to your web site without programming.
Introduction. If your web site requires more than showing HTML pages, you will have to code it using Java script or another programming language. Even if you don’t mind programming, you may end up with a single script managing both the site business logic and the presentation. The logic will be hard to read and maintain. Only the developers familiar with the codebase of your site will be able to make changes.
Welcome to the world of Business Rules Engines! Our solution allows you to specify site logic by combining your page controls with easy-to-read rules. Our rules management service can not only inference new data values for your pages but take care of displaying them as well. You can enter the rules in your preferred order, move them around, graphically create conditions and actions, prioritize them, enter formulas, build vocabularies, and create Facts specific to your site. Depending on the complexity of your project, you can build the entire site without writing a single line of programming code. But the rules are not just a replacement of code – they are better because they describe the logic in your terms, and they are easily manageable, available to none-programmers, and reliant on logical inferences as opposed to hard-coded sequences of program operators.
Our product is not an HTML editor. You still have to build your web pages and identify the controls that you wish to apply your logic to. Once you design the presentation of your site, link the controls with RuleLab.Net, and build the rules – your site will come alive as if written by programmers.
If you are looking for an example of calling the rules engine directly from a web page then Web Site Business Logic Manager is not what you need. Go to the rock identification expert system to see a reusable example of running the rules engine web service straight from an HTML page.
The Rules Designer hosted on the RuleLab.Net web site arms you with tools for building rules operating on your web page controls. The rules will be stored in a dedicated project, in an online repository always ready to support your site. Setting up the web site rules project is easy – simply include the predefined code snippets into your web pages and submit them to RuleLab.Net using the project Wizard. The Wizard will let you pick which controls you wish to utilize and will create the objects needed for you to enter and verbalize the business rules. Once deployed, the rules will drive your web site.
To
build a web page driven by the server-side business logic, you have to create
it in HTML and design the associated rules. Your web site can be hosted
anywhere. The rules will run on the RuleLab.Net server. Your page(s) will
include the
RuleLab.Net is a commercial Business Rules Management System. Web Site Business Logic Manager is built on top of it. By using RuleLab.Net you can turn your web site into a powerful application where the logic can be maintained graphically from anywhere on the internet. You can use any web tools you like to design the presentation of your web pages but when it comes to adding intelligence to your site use the power and the online convenience of RuleLab.Net.
Once complete, your web site business logic will be described in an English-like syntax, easily readable and maintainable. It will be accessible through the graphical web interface and it will always be ready to take control of your web page.
How does it work? During the
design, RuleLab.Net generates an XML document describing your web site. Each
applicable control of your web page has a corresponding entry in that document
and a reference that the Rules Engine uses to access it. References are
enclosed into Atoms. On top of Atoms, there are Facts, Vocabulary Terms and the
actual Rules. You can add your own Facts and Vocabulary Terms in order to make
your Rules more readable and consolidate common pieces of logic and data. Rules
can be tested via the web page or through the test screen which is part of the
Rules Designer. When visitors interact with your web site, the web pages feed
Atoms with data while the Rules Engine parses data against the inference rules
yielding new data values. The derived data is propagated back to your web site
- via
For your convenience, RuleLab.Net manages the state of your visitor session. Data entered on the preceding pages will be automatically available to the current page, both for rule processing and presentation. RuleLab.Net server keeps track of entered data so you don’t have to. For example, you are building an ordering system where customer enters his/her name on the first page, then goes through a long chain of pages ending up on the summary page. Normally you’d have to store the information from each page and carry it through the entire process. But with RuleLab.Net state persistency you can utilize same control IDs in order to render the corresponding data on any page. Simply create a label (span) on the last page with the control ID of the customer name input from the first page.
The online service. Using the RuleLab.Net Web Site Business Logic Manager requires you (not your web site visitors) to subscribe to the RuleLab.Net online service. This service allows you to build rules, store them in the online repository, and to run them off your web site. Changes that you make to the online ruleset will immediately affect all visitors of your web site. In addition, you can use the Visitor Data Viewer to browse/retrieve data entered through the web pages powered by RuleLab.Net.
As a web site author you can build a powerful rule based site without backend programming or client-side scripting (note that some predefined scripts have to be included in your page). Developers can take it one step further by creating an application that parses visitor data. RuleLab.Net provides a web service to pull visitor data via XML. See the Visitor Data Viewer as an example of using this service.
What’s next? Read the details of building a Web Site Rules Project.
Check out the demo of a small web site driven by the online business rules. To browse session data log into the Visitor Data Viewer as demo/demo.
Learn more about RuleLab.Net architecture.
Subscribe to the free trial of the online (ASP) service. The online service description includes various options available to developers. It explains the Rules Engine integration, programming environments and required skills. While your service subscription will enable the development options, you can skip the parts that fall outside of the scope of the Web Site Rules Project.