Red Hat upgrades JBoss for intelligent business decision making

Red Hat on Wednesday unveiled significant updates to its JBoss enterprise services, designed to bring more intelligent automated decision making to business rules, while tapping into a broader range of data sources to inform decision making.

The changes are coming in JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.2 and JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.2, which gains additional data source support and the ability to choose different business process languages.

In addition, an overhauled version of the JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System (BRMS), has been re-engineered to go beyond rules to form an intelligent decision platform, Red Hat said.

Set to be available by the end of October, JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.2 adds support for complex event processing (CEP), which incorporates awareness of relevant business events to make decisions more intelligent and more responsive to changing situations, according to Red Hat.

"You can start to analyse business events as they happen, such as watching credit card transactions for unusual events like a purchase in London and one in New York on the same day," said Pierre Fricke, director of SOA product management for Red Hat's JBoss subsidiary.

BRMS also adds a business user interface that uses web-based decision tables, aimed at making it easier for non-experts to use, plus enhanced rules logic supporting "goal-seeking" so the rules engine can identify conditions to deliver the necessary results.

Meanwhile, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.2, coming in November, is extended with support for the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), which will allow for orchestration of processes across web services and cloud-based services, according to Red Hat.

It also expands messaging options with Red Hat's own MRG, which is built on the open standard Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), adding a high-performance, low-latency alternative to the three current messaging choices.

JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.2, also due in November, adds support for Teradata, Ingres, Mondrian, and JavaScript Object Notation (Json) as data sources, while providing the ability to publish data services in the Rest architecture. It also gains batter access control to metadata repositories via XML Schema support.

The vision behind all these updates is to work towards the intelligent, integrated enterprise, said Fricke.

"Business events are happening all the time, such as mortgage applications coming in or payments being made, and complex event processing in particular is key to looking at what's happening in real time while a process is still going through," he explained.

"We're putting features in that make it easier to build such a system, and will continue to do so."