Rules Engine - pros and cons

I'm auditing a project that uses what is called a Rules Engine. In short, it's a way to externalize business logic from application code.

This concept is entirely new to me and I'm pretty skeptical about it. After hearing people talk about Anemic Domain Models for the past few years, I'm questioning the Rules Engine Approach. To me they seem like a great way to WEAKEN a domain model. For example say I'm doing a java webapp interacting with a Rules Engine. Then I decide I want to have an Android app based on the same domain. Unless I want the Android app to interact with the Rules Engine as well, I'm going to have to miss out on whatever business logic was already written.

As I don't have any experience with them yet, just curiosity, I was interested to hear about the pros and cons are in using a Rules Engine? The only pro that I can think of is that you don't need to rebuild your entire Application just to change some business rule (but really, how many apps really have that many changes?). But using a Rules Engine to solve that problem kind of sounds to me like putting a band-aid over a shotgun wound.

UPDATE - since writing this, the god himself, Martin Fowler, has blogged about using a Rules engine.

Most rule engines that I have seen are viewed as a black box by system code. If I were to build a domain model, I would probably want certain business rules to be intrinsic to the domain model, e.g. business rules that tell me when an object has invalid values. This allows multiple systems to share the domain model without duplicating business logic. I could have each system use the same rule service to validate my domain model, but this appears to weaken my domain model (as was pointed out in the question). Why? Because instead of consistently enforcing my business rules across all systems at all times, I am relying on system programmers to determine when the business rules should be enforced (by calling the rule service). This may not be a problem if the domain model comes to you completely populated, but can be problematic if you're dealing with a user interface or system that changes values in the domain model over its lifetime.

There is another class of business rules: decision making. For example, an insurance company may need to classify the risk of underwriting an applicant and arrive at a premium. You could place these types of business rules in your domain model, but a centralized decision for scenarios like this are usually desirable and, actually, fit quite well into a service-oriented architecture. This does beg the question of why a rule engine and not system code. The place where a rule engine may be a better choice is where business rules responsible for the decision change over time (as some other answers have pointed out).

Rule engines usually allow you to change rules without restarting your system or deploying new executable code (regardless of what promises you receive from a vendor, do make sure you test your changes in a non-production environment because, even if the rule engine is flawless, humans are still changing the rules). If you're thinking, "I can do that by using a database to store values that change", you're right. A rule engine is not a magical box that does something new . It is intended to be a tool that provides a higher level of abstraction so you can focus less on reinventing the wheel. Many vendors take this a step further by letting you create templates so that business users can fill in the blanks instead of learning a rule language.

One parting caution about templates: templates can never take less time than writing a rule without a template because the template must, at the bare minimum, describe the rule. Plan for a higher initial cost (the same as if you were to build a system that used a database to store values that change vs. writing the rules in directly in system code) - the ROI is because you save on future maintenance of system code.

I think your concerns about anemic domain models are valid.

I've seen two applications of a well-known commercial Rete rules engine running in production where I work. I'd consider one a success and the other a failure.

The successful application is a decision tree app, consisting of ~10 trees of ~30 branch points each. The rules engine has a UI that does allow business folks to maintain the rules.

The less successful application has ~3000 rules slammed into a rules database. No one has any idea if there are conflicting rules when a new one is added. There is little understanding of the Rete algorithm, and the expertise with the product has left the firm, so it's become a black box that's untouchable and unrefactorable. The deployment cycle is still affected by rules changes - a complete regression test must be done when rules are changed. Memory was an issue, too.

I'd tread lightly. When a rule set is modest in size it's easy to understand changes, like the simplistic e-mail sample given above. Once the number of rules climbs into the hundreds I think you might have a problem.

I'd also worry about a rules engine becoming a singleton bottleneck in your application.

I see nothing wrong with using objects as a way to partition that rules engine space. Embedding behavior in objects that defer to a private rules engine seems okay to me. Problems will hit you when the rules engine requires state that isn't part of its object to fire properly. But that's just another example of design being difficult.