Engineering

Practical Guide to Rules Engines

From Rete networks to JIT compilation — a hands-on guide to building, optimizing, and governing rule-based systems in Java.

9 modules

Rules Engines: What They Are and Why They Exist

From hardcoded if-else chains to declarative production systems

Inside RETE: How Rules Engines Match at Scale

From rule definitions to discrimination networks — understanding the algorithm that makes Drools fast

Execution Strategies

How a rules engine decides which rules to fire, in what order, and what it remembers between calls

Decision Structures

Tables, trees, and graphs — three ways to represent the same logic, with very different performance profiles

High-Performance Rule Evaluation

From automata theory to JIT compilation: the real levers for throughput and latency in production rule engines

Rules as Functions

Compose, memoize, and short-circuit your way to a lightweight rules library — no framework required

Architecture and Integration

From embedded engine to distributed decision service — deploying rules engines in production Java systems

Governance, Testing, and the Long Game

Why rules engines are easy to adopt and hard to operate — and what to do about it

Production Capstone

From curriculum to calibrated judgment: choosing, deploying, and knowing when to walk away

How this plan was made

Each plan on learnings is built by a hand-crafted agentic pipeline: research agents gather primary sources, a claim reviewer verifies facts against them, and a sequencer orders modules for how people actually learn. The curation — topic selection, framing, editorial standards — is Nicolas's. The research and writing is AI-assembled.