Jess Architecture in a J2EE Environment

Published:

July 7, 2004

We need to implement the Jess rules engine into a clusterable distributed environment. The question lies in how Jess is deployed.

It would appear that it cannot be deployed inside of an App Server because Jess does it’s own threading. After some research into JSR 94 (Rules engine API/SPI) it is still unclear how Jess would actually run in our environment. I seem to remember that Clipse ran as a single server instance and that our EJB’s across the cluster would access this single instance. I also believe that Jess would have to run in this way, as a single server, however Jess itself is not a server.

So how does an EJB in a cluster access the single instance of Jess? Do we write an RMI server to wrap the Jess instance (as suggested in “Jess in Action”), or do we some how use JCA to connect each App Server to Jess?

So far we’ve written the RMI wrapper, but it seems like this could be easier.