Business Rules Engine: A Modern Design Practice?

Thoughts after attending a knowledge sharing session today at work: People are talking about business rules engines and enterprise web-app designs based on the same – they are calling it a modern trend in IT design principles and seeing opening for usage of cutting-edge technology innovation from available BPM tools-gallery. Don’t know is it just me or is it really a less-known fact that business rules based application design has been there for ages (and by that I mean at least 15 years) and can be found in many legacy systems. I personally had experience in one that had character-based definitions of business rules that business users used to modify directly and the application used to perform quote-calculations based on those rules. Well, as a matter of fact, the system still exists and does the same operation till date. All that the new BPM tools are giving us today is a more visual way of handing the rules, ease of large scale design, and a feel-good sense for the less-informed who are thinking they are dealing with cutting-edge technology!

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