This is from a stackoverflow post that I found when I was asking the opposite of this question myself:
"I've seen two applications of a well-known commercial Rete rules engine running in production where I work. I'd consider one a success and the other a failure.
The successful application is a decision tree app, consisting of ~10 trees of ~30 branch points each. The rules engine has a UI that does allow business folks to maintain the rules.
The less successful application has ~3000 rules slammed into a rules database. No one has any idea if there are conflicting rules when a new one is added. There is little understanding of the Rete algorithm, and the expertise with the product has left the firm, so it's become a black box that's untouchable and unrefactorable. The deployment cycle is still affected by rules changes - a complete regression test must be done when rules are changed. Memory was an issue, too.
I'd tread lightly. When a rule set is modest in size it's easy to understand changes, like the simplistic e-mail sample given above. Once the number of rules climbs into the hundreds I think you might have a problem.
I'd also worry about a rules engine becoming a singleton bottleneck in your application.
I see nothing wrong with using objects as a way to partition that rules engine space. Embedding behavior in objects that defer to a private rules engine seems okay to me. Problems will hit you when the rules engine requires state that isn't part of its object to fire properly. But that's just another example of design being difficult."
My company is absolutely the second case, and it makes development awful. On top of that because of how complex things have come, business users don't interact with these rules at all, and all the work ends up on the devs.
"I've seen two applications of a well-known commercial Rete rules engine running in production where I work. I'd consider one a success and the other a failure.
The successful application is a decision tree app, consisting of ~10 trees of ~30 branch points each. The rules engine has a UI that does allow business folks to maintain the rules.
The less successful application has ~3000 rules slammed into a rules database. No one has any idea if there are conflicting rules when a new one is added. There is little understanding of the Rete algorithm, and the expertise with the product has left the firm, so it's become a black box that's untouchable and unrefactorable. The deployment cycle is still affected by rules changes - a complete regression test must be done when rules are changed. Memory was an issue, too.
I'd tread lightly. When a rule set is modest in size it's easy to understand changes, like the simplistic e-mail sample given above. Once the number of rules climbs into the hundreds I think you might have a problem.
I'd also worry about a rules engine becoming a singleton bottleneck in your application.
I see nothing wrong with using objects as a way to partition that rules engine space. Embedding behavior in objects that defer to a private rules engine seems okay to me. Problems will hit you when the rules engine requires state that isn't part of its object to fire properly. But that's just another example of design being difficult."
My company is absolutely the second case, and it makes development awful. On top of that because of how complex things have come, business users don't interact with these rules at all, and all the work ends up on the devs.