Likely a rules engine bundled with some form of business process management/modeling tool.

The rules engine is used to constrain/model the edges (transitions) of the overall graph of states within your overall business workflow finite state machine. This is generally implemented by throwing said rules engine at reams of data in the form of data validation, and inferring information from the various contexts that make up a system.

It's usually quite boring. Once you've seen a few, you've basically seen them all. The only differences boil down to the specifics of the industry, data model, and implementation of your basic frameworks.

In actual businesses there's basically maybe 4 actual software buckets that just about everything seems to end up degenerating to.

BPMA(Business Process Management/Automation, I.e. case/customer relation management, stuff related to doing business as a whole), OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing; how you get data in), AADPETLR (Accounting, Auditing, Data Processing, Extraction, Transformation, Loading, and Reporting; what you do with all that juicy data you've collected).

All of those as I understand it may tend to end up getting combined into something called an ERP, (Enterprise Resource... Platform, I think?)

Having worked on most individual parts at one point, it's a bloody drag reimplementing the same thing over and over again in different wrappers this time. It is, however, the glue that makes basically any modern business work. The funny bit is how pretty much everyone does the same bloody thing, but bends over backwards to protect info with regards to who they are doing/sharing it with; even from their own employees.

Full disclosure: I work on Kogito. This is a "rethinking" of our traditional engines (Drools, jBPM, OptaPlanner) especially meant for containerized/k8s/lightweight deployment, with support for native compilation through Quarkus.

Also you may want to take a look at our fresh new editors: they are available as VSCode extension, Chrome extension and stand-alone via bpmn.new and dmn.new :)

That sounds incredible.

I have no experience with Java/JVM, but found OptaPlanner online and immediately had a usecase for it.

Spent a weekend trying to get through it's documentation and example code, it was so heavy and complicated that I couldn't even get a basic concept or learning exercise written by myself. Reached out on their IRC, and it was dead.

Will definitely be taking a look at this!

Try our new guide that builds a REST service from scratch for highschool timetabling optimization: https://quarkus.io/guides/optaplanner

Yes, the IRC channel is dead - I 'll remove that link from the site. StackOverflow and our google group are very much alive.

I managed to get Camunda in a severless deployment: https://www.futurice.com/blog/serverless-camunda-terraform-r... Online demo https://camunda-flxotk3pnq-ew.a.run.app/camunda-welcome/inde... I'll checkout kogito, I want something that connects with pubsub for a push workflow better

look at our quickstarts, we support Kafka https://github.com/kiegroup/kogito-examples#kogito-with-kafk...

There's a relatively new one by Camunda (https://zeebe.io/) that also works quite well in cloud native environments.

I came across Kogito some days ago as I was looking into some alternatives for our drools based engine. I'd like to build some kind of online editor for business people to manage drm rules easily. How would one go about doing something like that with Kogito?

our online editors + a ci/cd pipeline to build Kogito services would be great. The `kogito` cli can be used to get that kind of workflow -- you can point it to a git repo with, say, a BPMN or DMN file and get a working service out of that ( well bugs aside :^) -- it's all very in flux ) take a peek here https://github.com/kiegroup/kogito-cloud-operator#deploying-...

we are updating, reorganizing and refreshing our documentation :)

Could you please share your reasons for looking at alternatives to Drools? I am in the process of evaluating Drools and it will be great to understand why people move away from it.

"Looking for alternatives" was maybe a bit too much. As far I understood these are built pretty much on the same core? So using the same rule sets should work on Kogito too. We recently moved to micro services and I'd like to have the editor as part of another service instead of kie workbench so I've been looking around for ways to accomplish that.

you should look into our new tooling https://kiegroup.github.io/kogito-online/#/

also, yes: Kogito is still based on Drools for the rules part

This is the exact use case we have as well. We tried business central but it seemed too heavy and it was hard to develop a streamlined experience for the users so we had to drop it. Looking for a more lightweight solution. Will definitely check this out