Extending business objects with business rules

Abstract

It is common to imbed business rules within the code of distributed object systems. When business practices and/or policies change, as they often do, it is difficult if not impossible to correctly reflect those changes in the applications implementing them. This paper describes a framework that enables enterprises to develop distributed business applications that systematically externalize the time- and situation-variable parts of their business logic as externally applied entities called business rules. Decoupling business rules from the application can provide a number of advantages. Because business rules are external to the applications that depend upon them, the variable business logic contained in them can easily be changed. Because the management of the externalized business rules is done explicitly through a rule management facility, it is easy to understand what rules exist and to locate those that need to be changed. The Accessible Business Rule (ABR) framework is available as early test function in IBM Component Broker 2.0 and 3.0 (a part of WebSphere Enterprise).