Tutorial scenario and prerequisites
Review the scenario and prerequisites before you begin the tutorial.
In this tutorial, you create a web-based application for a fictitious online lender. The web-based application is called Miniloan. It determines whether a customer is eligible for a loan according to specific criteria. The criteria include the amount of the loan, the annual income of the borrower, and the duration of the loan.
When you create Miniloan, you learn how to develop a rule-based application in Rule Designer, and how to run and monitor rules in Rule Execution Server.
Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server are two components in Decision Server Rules. Rule Designer is the environment for developing and authoring rules, and Rule Execution Server is the environment for running and monitoring rules.
To make Miniloan, you follow the typical rule development workflow. You start from a version of the application that is hardcoded in Java, and then you replace the hardcoded logic with business rules. By doing so, you discover the steps that are required to develop, deploy, and maintain a rule-based application.
The following diagram shows the rule development workflow from design to publication.
For more information about a particular step, see the summary for a list of related information and tutorials.
Prerequisites
Before you start the tutorial, ensure that your workstation meets the following requirements:
- Review the product overview to understand the main goals of the product, some of its modules, and rule-oriented terminology.
- A knowledge of Java is helpful.
- A knowledge of the Eclipse workspaces, perspectives, and views is helpful. If you are not familiar with Eclipse, you can go through the short Eclipse Hello World cheat sheet.
Install the required components:
- Decision Server Rules: Contains Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server.
- Decision Center: Required only if you want to do Task 7: Publishing to Decision Center.
- Sample server: Runs web-based components locally. Installation Manager installs the server by default (see Installing Operational Decision Manager on a single workstation).
Ensure that the required products, getting started projects, and the sample server are installed (see Checking your installation).
For more information about the required products and their modules, see Installing Operational Decision Manager.
Audience
This tutorial is intended for developers and product architects.
Learning objectives
You learn how to create a rule-based application in Rule Designer, and how to run and monitor rules in Rule Execution Server. If you are using this tutorial for the first time, read the related sections as well.
This tutorial covers the following development aspects of Operational Decision Manager:
- Designing a rule project
- Orchestrating rule tasks
- Writing business rules
- Testing and debugging rules
- Deploying rules to a runtime environment
- Monitoring and auditing rules
- Publishing a rule project to a development environment for business users
Time required
This tutorial takes 3-4 hours to complete.