Business rules software vendor Ilog has introduced a new business rules studio for the Eclipse open source integrated development environment (IDE).

Based on its business rules management product Ilog JRules, Business Rule Studio Developer Edition is available as a free download.

It is built on the Eclipse IDE for easier management, optimisation and visualisation of the rules that govern business processes in Java-based software.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Consortium, said in a statement: "The availability of Ilog Business Rule Studio will give Java developers using Eclipse a significant new productivity tool to create more flexible enterprise architectures."

The creation of open source business rules technology will allow Eclipse developers to employ business rules to make changes to embedded software legacy code in order to implement new policies and processes.

It is available as a free download to streamline the evaluation procedures for Java-based rules engines.

Jim Sinur, vice president and research area director at analyst Gartner, told vnunet.com: "Development environments like Microsoft .Net and other Java equivalents are somewhat commoditised. Enabling [JRules] to run on Eclipse is a smart thing to do."

Business Rule Studio contains an embedded rule engine for rapid prototyping and execution and includes capabilities developers use to evaluate Java and J2EE-based application business rules, such as authoring, testing and debugging.

It also includes a project-based management tool to manage rules in the same way developers manage Java code, a rule editor tool for help, and error checking.

The software will run on Eclipse 2.1 or WebSphere Application Developer 5.1 and is available now at brstudio.ilog.com.