WHAT IS RMA

What is RMA...or say rule maintenance application abbreviated as RMA is the strongest feature of blaze infact I would say RMA provided blaze an edge over other brms products available in the market.

RMA provides the UI i.e the interface from where end user can cange the rules on the fly i.e RMA doesn't require to restart the server for reflection of newly coded rules.

RMA only provides those entities through the interface which has been exposed i.e by default all the entities which have instances in the blaze integration development environment will be exposed to rma until there has been filtration made at the generation of the RMA.

RMA can expose the following entities

• decison table

• decision trees

• functions

• any template instances.

Lets take an example in a credit card company the interest rate was currently being applied as 5percent and there comes a law or say amendment in which the rate has to be change as 7 percent ,in that case the business experts could just just change the exposed value of interest rat through RMA itself and it will all be done.

RMA saves a lot of effort in terms of money as well as time.

Following are the main part of RMA

• Templates
• web application
• Templates Instances

SO i guess this brief post has given you an overview of WHAT IS RMA..???? :)

"What Are Business Rules"

"What are Business Rules" !!! ..Though sometime it sounds a very simple term but business rules carry a real depth infact It is the core of any business,organization,corporation....
("What are Business Rules")Business rules defines
the logic,the constraints ,macro level definitions,the strategy ,infact the whole architecture of any enterprise.
("What are Business Rules")Business rules projects the processes and computing of an organization
and thus ,places all this scrambled pieces together to achieve common goals.

For example let say , there is a credit card company XYZ.For this company the business rules can be as follows :

if credit rating of a customer is 1
assign 600$ credit limit

if credit rating is 2
assign 500$ credit limit

So,here you see the business rules is set of statements that drive the business i.e. assigning a specific credit limit as per the credit rating.
("What are Business Rules").....Hope the statements above clarified this question....still it has a vast implication,I tried to narrow it down to a bit.

BLAZE ADVISOR TUTORIAL--AN INTRODUCTION

Blaze is a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) that manages businessrules which are nothing else but the essential conditions that drives the business.

Blaze is the most advanced rule management technology available in the market that added a Zest in the current business scenario and has taken the management and automation of business rules to the zenith.Blaze lowered the total cost that got induced due to delay in implementation of business rules and also shifted the ownership of changing the rules from I.T(Information Technology) on the fly that means a Business System Analyst (B.S.A) can change a business rule without going to create I.T change request thus lowering down the cost involved.Moreover an instant business need can be tackled easily and instantly.

Blaze works on Business Objects i.e Blaze Advisor Rule service analyze the state of the business object entered and as per that rules execution takes place.e.g. Let a Loan application business object entered into the Business Rule Engine(BRE) then the state will be analyzed say its credit history,loan pending etc and on that basis decide whether the loan has to be given or not.Blaze uses Structured Rule Language generally abbreviated as SRL is object oriented programming based language that make reading and writing of business rules as English-like in a way.So its got pretty easy for analyst to write rules without having much exposure to I.T background

Blaze offers Business Rules Application Development ,its maintenance and deployment across various platforms.Blaze comprises of the following components.

• Rules Repository : Its a secure system for storing,organizing and retrieval of files,folders,projects and sub-projects.Blaze offers various options for rule repository i.e File Repository,Database Repository and LDAP Repository with or without BVS versioning having flavors of private and shared.
• Builder IDE :Blaze Advisor Integrated Development Environment provides you a powerful GUI where you can use SRL to explore the power of BLAZE ADVISOR.It got each and every option that you'll be needing during your course of development with each and everything configurable.
• RMA :Rule Maintenance Aplication i.e RMA is the most powerful and tempting feature of the Blaze Advisor that provides the configurable rule widgets that can be used to change the rules on the fly by the business analysts.
• RuleFlows & Decision Metaphors : These involves the main decision entities such as decision tables scoremodels ,decision trees and the main sequence known as ruleflow which contains the event that got to be executed again based on certain conditions.

Blaze Advisor is designed to be part or we can say component of a larger Enterprise system which can host a JVM since Blaze is a java based tool also it supports for dotnet environment also.Hence it provides a multiple deployment ways e.g can be run as standalone application,deployed as Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) or it can be accessed as webservice or can even be integrated with any messaging technologies having java access e.g JMS.

This article is basically to provide a brief interview and business implication of Blaze Advisor .My next post will be going through each kind-a deployment step by step available with blaze.

Blaze Advisor 7.0

Cool cat Fair Isaac's rule engine is now in a new form i.e Blaze Advisor 7.0.Blaze advisor 7.0 is a effort to keep in pace with the current market standard and I must say that it is really a worthy to give a shot.Since the market is always demanding i.e the rule "Anything constant is change only" always apply for the market.hence the change in market leads to change in business rules and so, blaze rules engine is more advanced and user friendly in answer to its competitions.

Blaze rule engine new form is really charming as this blaze advisor 7.0 comes with new astonishing features.Lets go one by one the feature blaze rule engine is offering us.

• In Blaze Advisor 7.0 builder is gone i.e been replaced with a eclipse plugin that helps to work in a industry based environment and also helps in working on multiple blaze rules projects simultaneously.
• Blaze rules engine is now more powerful when it comes on dealing with decision trees,it shrinks the complex tree for better viewing while analyzing the whole tree.
• Blaze rules engine RMA(Rule maintenance Application) is always been the most attractive feature for the business analysts.this power packed feature now provides more intuitional and highly responsive control when it comes to look at the work one is doing.It now include click through editing of ruleflow components,copying through rulesets and improved project reports etc.
• Now the excel integration with Blaze Advisor 7.0 is also hoghly responsive.It enables the business analysts to change decision tables through excels itself also they can save local copy or edit offline.
• To meet industry standards Blaze Advisor 7.0 has an addition of a br-unit test-framework based on industry standard xUnit framework.Now developers can unit test the business rules effectively.
• Blaze Advisor 7.0 also now includes visual comparison editor that enables to get the list of differences in a highlighted way.

As we have gone through the major features that Blaze Advisor 7.0 has brought to us , the one obvious questions that comes to mind is that what will be the migration steps or validation that needs to be carried out when migrating a 6.5x repository to the Blaze Advisor 7.0 repository.
So here we goes with the migration steps or you can say validations.

• LDAP(no versioning) , LDAP(BVS versioning-private) , LDAP(BVS versioning-shared), Database(BVS Versioning-shared) repsoitory types are no longer been supported with Blaze advisor 7.0.However to use these repositories you have to convert them to the supported repositories of Blaze Advisor 7.0
  
• As soon as you connect to a repository through Blaze Advisor 7.0 a dialogue box appears that prompt for upgradation of system folder that is located in the admin repository folder.
• If you are using versioned repository than you can check fro the option of checking in after changes are made to system folder.
• One can even opt for not upgrading its repository but then he'll not be able to use the new features Blaze Advisor 7.0 is offering,Moreover the project folder colour will be different in order to differentiate it from Blaze Advisor 7.0 repository.
  
• It is advisable to create a copy of Blaze Advisor 7.0 before upgradation as if any error has occured between upgrade the changes will be irreversible.
• RMA(Rule Maintenance Application) that is created in earlier version needs to be regenerated with this release of Blaze Advisor 7.0.