Drools session at Indianapolis Java User Group

I attended a JBoss Drools session at the Indianapolis JUG yesterday evening. The session was presented by Ray Ploski, a Principal Solution Architect with Redhat.
Ray went over the breadth of product offerings within the Drools Umbrella -

• Drools Expert(the Rule engine)
• Drools Guvnor(Rules Hosting/Management)
• Drools Fusion(Complex Event Processing) 
• Drools Planner(Planning)
• Drools Flow(Process Flow)

All these product offerings is together referred to as the "Drools Business Logic Integration Platform". 

I had gone into the meeting with the mistaken assumption that Drools is just a rule engine and came out  a little wiser. 

Some notes that I have from the meeting are the following:

• Ray has hosted the presentation, samples at this location - http://bit.ly/cjug-drools-2011
• Drools Flow is being merged into jBPM5 - with support for Graphical process flows tightly integrated with Drools Expert.
• Rules and other artifacts can be versioned within Guvnor - internally it uses JCR as the API for versioning with Jack Rabbit as the implementation
• Java code can implement a pull based model, to pull in rules from Guvnor - at a specified schedule pull in the latest rules from Guvnor, thus reflecting the rule changes without needing to restart application
• Drools Expert uses a MVEL dialect to express the condition(LHS) part of the rule
• One of the largest Drools users has Million and a half rules defined!

PS: E-gineering hosted this meeting at their great new office location.