. . . building adaptive application architectures for high performance, scalable enterprise applications . . .

An increasingly competitive business environment and heightened focus on the customer have driven companies to leverage technology resources in new and creative ways. Factors such as changing consumer expectations, and hyper-competitive business cycles, all force companies to continuously automate business processes and customer interactions, while also ensuring that these processes are adaptive and flexible to meet changing needs. The result is a development, integration and maintenance challenge that can be addressed only by an intelligent mix of architecture, technology and methodology.

In part, advances in data and application integration have met this challenge. However, integration at the level of business logic, processes and workflows lags behind. The process has however, begun. Much as database management systems revolutionized how data is managed and shared, Business Rule Management Systems are beginning to revolutionize how the other important asset: business rules, are managed and shared across applications.

The Ideal Business Rules Management System (BRMS).
The separation of business rules from data and application layers should facilitate change, promote reuse, minimize redundancy and permit heterogeneity and scalability of the technical architecture. Each one of these requirements poses restrictions on the ideal architecture of an effective BRMS. A key expectation is that any solution must support either centralized or distributed storage, access, and management of business rules. The solution must also meet performance and reliability requirements in order to support new and existing business functions. DAMAN's BRMS™ is such a solution and meets all the aforementioned criteria.

Daman BRMS™: The Benefits.

Management of Business Rules. The Daman business rules management system is a database independent mechanism for the storage and management of business rules. A consistent representation of business rules allows business rules to be isolated and modularized. No proprietary languages are used and access functions written in Java ensure that any application on any platform can access all business rules!

Reusability of Existing Enterprise Business Logic. The Daman BRM™ representation mechanism is extensible to extant business logic. A "Wrapper" service allows encapsulation of business logic to allow enterprise-wide access as well as capture of metadata to be incorporated into the BRMS™ metamodel.

Exponential Improvement in Maintenance Productivity. Metadata for all business rules is captured in an object-oriented framework, allowing impact analysis and reporting in seconds for changes in business rules, applications, and data schemas. Compare this with the days or weeks it can take to perform comprehensive impact analysis of changes introduced into a system in more traditional architectures!

Greatly Enhanced Application Development Productivity. Business rules can be readily inventoried and accessed by application programmers. Declarative representation insulates programmers from business logic while providing all necessary information (such as inputs and outputs) for appropriate selection, updates, deletions and/or combination in application development processes. The result? Greatly enhanced programmer productivity. Even more importantly, as the proportion of an enterprise's business logic integrated into this framework increases, productivity gains accelerate. At one client site, productivity improvement for the first application developed within the framework was 400%. For the next application, it was 2000%!

High Performance, Scalability and Reliability. The Daman BRMS architecture allows for replicating services for greater performance and scalability. Mirroring services support fault-tolerant requirements. "Need-based" processing made possible by declarative representation of business rules and supported by the intelligent engine maximizes optimal access and instantiation of business rules. In most cases it is the intelligent engine that selects the execution plan for 'firing' business rules to get the desired result set in the fastest time. Finally, a patented "result-set" caching mechanism further enhances performance.

BRMS™ Architecture.

The BRMS is comprised of the following components:

Business Rules Repository
The Daman BRMS™ is a database independent solution. The Business rules repository can be any database flat-file, relational or object-oriented, or if desired business rules can be stored in-memory. Business rules, extant or newly defined, are defined using standard 3GL in procedural and/ or declarative form. Each rule is provided with an API in C, C++, JAVA, and XML. Metadata is then captured and represented in the BRMS™ metamodel.

Business Rules Engine
At the heart of the Daman BRMS™ is the business rules engine. It has the following functions:

• Supports procedural and declarative business rule processing
• Creates execution plan for optimally executing business rules
• Exposes metadata of the business rules
• Supports "Wrapper" service that facilitates access of existing enterprise business rules written in 3GLs or 4GLs that support data exchange

Data Access Manager

• Database access methods transparent to the application developer
• Provides JDBC/ODBC/OLE-DB and native access to variety of data sources
• Integrates data from multiple sources
• Optimizes database queries by optimizing data caching and read-ahead functionality
• Manages simultaneous database access of multiple business rules
• Houses all tracking algorithms

Online and Batch Services Controllers

• Optimizes load balance and processing of online/batch transactions
• Supports efficient management of threads and connections of many clients
• Supports optional encryption, authentication and authorization.
• Manages threads and connections to support many clients efficiently
• Facility to format the output from result sets

Administration Tool

• Facilitates searching and viewing business rules and their attributes
• Provides view of business rules hierarchy using Microsoft's file manager/explorer paradigm
• Supports performing impact analysis of rules added, updated, or deleted