clara

Clara is a forward-chaining rules engine written in Clojure with Java interoperability.

The expression of arbitrary, frequently changing business logic is a major source of complexity. Clara aims to rein in this complexity by untangling business logic, expressing it as composable rules while leveraging the advantages of the Clojure and Java ecosystems. Clara should be usable as a Clojure library to simplify our logic or as an alternative to other Java-based rules engines like Drools.

Objectives include:

• Embrace immutability. The rule engine's working memory is a persistent Clojure data structure that can participate in transactions. All changes produce a new working memory that shares state with the previous.
• Rule constraints and actions are Clojure s-expressions.
• Working memory facts are typically Clojure records or Java objects following the Java Bean conventions.
• Support the major advantages of existing rules systems, such as explainability of why a rule fired and automatic truth maintenance.
• Collections of facts can be reasoned with using accumulators similar to Jess or Drools. These accumulators leverage the reducers API and are transparently parallelized.
• The working memory is independent of the logic flow, and can be replaced with a distributed processing system. A prototype that uses Storm to apply rules to a stream of incoming events already exists. Leveraging other processing infrastructures is possible.

Example

Here's a simple example. The clara-examples project shows more sophisticated rules and queries.

(ns clara.support-example
  (:require [clara.rules :refer :all]))

(defrecord SupportRequest [client level])

(defrecord ClientRepresentative [name client])

(defrule is-important
  "Find important support requests."
  [SupportRequest (= :high level)]
  =>
  (println "High support requested!"))

(defrule notify-client-rep
  "Find the client represntative and send a notification of a support request."
  [SupportRequest (= ?client client)]
  [ClientRepresentative (= ?client client) (= ?name name)] ; Join via the ?client binding.
  =>
  (println "Notify" ?name "that"  ?client "has a new support request!"))

;; Run the rules! We can just use Clojure's threading macro to wire things up.
(-> (mk-session)
    (insert (->ClientRepresentative "Alice" "Acme")
            (->SupportRequest "Acme" :high))
    (fire-rules))

;;;; Prints this:

;; High support requested!
;; Notify Alice that Acme has a new support request!

Usage

Add the following to your project.clj:

[org.toomuchcode/clara-rules "0.1.1"]

or to your Maven POM:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.toomuchcode</groupId>
  <artifactId>clara-rules</artifactId>
  <version>0.1.1</version>
</dependency>

Learn more

• The introduction page provides an overview of the project.
• The architecture overview goes into how Clara works.
• The developer guide is in progress.
• See the clara-examples project examples page for some examples.

License

Copyright © 2013 Ryan Brush

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.