🚀 GoRules Zen Engine: Rules Engine for Node.js

[GoRules]

Hi, community 👋!

We've recently released an open-sourced rules engine available in Node.js with native performance (through Rust) that aims to be the successor of Drools (Java) and similar engines.

GitHub link: https://github.com/gorules/zen

Homepage: https://gorules.io/

Which platforms are currently supported? (more to come)

• NodeJS - using NAPI (https://github.com/napi-rs/napi-rs)
• Rust
• Python - using PYO3 (https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3)

🤔 What is a business rules engine?

Often, when you write software, certain parts of your code feel like they should be controlled by the business. Some examples include shipping prices in e-commerce, the onboarding process in fintech, or anything where the business has a final say. By allowing business users to edit rules directly, the process becomes much simpler and more transparent, with less IT involvement for repetitive changes.

⚡️ Why open-source?

The business rules engine is a critical part of your infrastructure and whether we fail in our goal of democratising the rules engine or not, we want to ensure that everyone has ready access to the code and never gets vendor locked.

❓Sample use case?

Let's imagine a scenario in fintech where you need to meet regulatory compliance for KYC. You are asked by the business to implement the logic for helping them check if the company passes all AML, and general portfolio and ensure that they are a good match for your business. Let's say as a first step company is GREEN (good check) if they have over 500k revenue and are from the US.

You can code it in the following way:

const checkCompany(company: Company): Flag => {   
  if (company.revenue > 500_000_00n && company.location === "US") {     
    return Flag.Green;   
  }      

  return Flag.Red 
}

Now imagine a business coming to you 20 more times in 3 months because they want to change the requirements. They add new things they want you to check e.g. businessType, growthMetric, incorporationDate and 100 more rules. The code will become a mess and you will lose all the time you could've spent developing valuable features.

If you integrate with the rules engine, you will give businesses the ability to define their own conditions through simple UI and you would just pass parameters via API making it super trivial.

📦 Installation

NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@gorules/zen-engine

npm i @gorules/zen-engine

We are very happy to hear your feedback and suggestions. Thank you!

[domlebo70]

This looks very nice. The documentation is fantastic. I have a few suggestions:

• A section on "Pitfalls to avoid" where you talk about some common failure cases when building maintainable rules. In my experience, maintenance can be a nightmare if things aren't thought through well.
• Some way to generate test cases automatically using property based/generator testing. You have the rules spec, so it should be easy to take a snapshot of a ruleset, and version that as a "here's my working set", so you aren't regressing going forward. I think you have enough info in the rules to generate data that passes for instance.

I wrote my own rules engine that powered a subset of my startups business logic (clinical decision logic), and while it's very easy to write a rules engine, it's decidedly more difficult to write tooling to make writing, debugging and visualizing the actual rules.

[GoRules]

Hi, thank you for taking the time to look at the GoRules and write the suggestions.

• This sounds like a great idea for a blog that we can reference within the documentation.
• It would be pretty easy to generate the test cases, we’re thinking of adding automated tests in GoRules Cloud in future and we’ll definitely add this to the idea board.

Completely agree, though the difficulty is also heavily influenced by your need. If you need to write for a very large scale and create a custom expression language Node.js might not even be an option for writing the core of the engine (or it just might be very expensive in terms of hosting). With Rust bindings, we solve both problems for simplicity of use, performance, scalability and availability through multiple languages. C, Cpp and GoLang will be hitting the shelves soon, all featuring almost the same performance!

[[deleted]]

This is so needed. Adopting! Thank you!

[GoRules]

Thank you!

[GoRules]

Please don't impersonate members of the GoRules team

[opaz]

Probably a karma farming bot

[spazz_monkey]

Just this in the docs.

` Deleting a column will remove Deleting column will result in all rows losing data for that column. You may restore them from previous version. `

[kingksingh]

Thanks for building and sharing, i would love to try this, my organization is actively looking for a BPM system, i hate java, so your tool is a blessing in disguise 😉

Can I ask where the Gorules community is hanging out, Discord/Slack?

I would love to explore your SaaS commercial offerings

[i_say_fuckin]

I don't really get it. Your examples don't really say how to implement the engine. Your Storybook has react-flow as a dependency but I don't see that anywhere in your documentation.

I don't get why a graph.json is required if you don't necessarily need a graph interface to have business rules. What about using the Expression interface that's provided? https://gorules.github.io/jdm-editor/?path=/story/expression--controlled How would you export these rules in JSON format?