An approach for defining rules as functions in rule-based software development

In order to quickly response to changes in requirements or business rules, rule-based software development has been introduced to separate the business rules from the application code. Rule engine is adopted to achieve this aim and makes the business rules as an independent part. Business rules can be modified without affecting to the application, thus cost, time and effort in requirement analysis, implementation, testing and deployment are reduced. Even though many rule engines are available in the market, it is not easy to implement them with an existing application as developers' perception need to be changed. Developers have to extract the rules (from the block of logic code) in application, transform them to the rule syntax of that engine, and modify the old code to execute these rules. This paper describes an approach for defining business rules that are similar to programming and designs an execution engine to be contained in the application regardless of the architecture.