Rule Engine Integration with AEM

We have been integrating various applications with Adobe experience Manager. Some examples are search, social integration, etc.

There are cases where we need to integrate Java-based rule engines (For e.g Drools, IBM ODM, JRule, etc.). Let us see how we can integrate them.

What is rule engine?
Rule engines are used to provide business-based decisions while processing data. For e.g., when a loan is to be processed based on a lender's salary, and many parameters, we can have a rule engine integrated with AEM.

How can we achieve this?
To achieve this we may need multiple layers as shown.

Business rule layer
As seen in the diagram, The rule developer (skill set is prior to working knowledge on rule engines) develops the rules, tests them and deploys the rules. These rules are created on a rule engine.

The rule developed resides in a rule repository (back-end of the rule engine).

The Business professional (Skillset is business understanding of rules) who creates the rules, will have a UI access of rule engine and based on the rule developers rules, he creates new rules to satisfy a business condition.

Web service layer.
Here the Java is deployed on any server. The Java code will perform activities of invoking the Rule engine and process rules; these rules will be handed over to AEM through an https layer in XML or JSON format.