It´s been a long time since I ...

Well yes!, it´s been a long time since the last time I wrote in this blog.. and a lot of things happened as well. The thing is, that I have been doing a lot of stuff lately and I´m going to share some of it, starting with a little set of frameworks related to the main topic of this blog: semantics.

First of all, a little of history :D

My first experience with semantic programming was some years ago, when I was assigned (with 2 colleagues) to a "highly urgent project" :P for Telefonica. It was a use case simulator for testing, so we had a lot of different input/output cases.

In order to relate the thousands of different input/output (a group of inputs/outputs would be a use case, depending on some conditions) we used a rule engine to generate and filter them.

Why did we use a rule engine? Because we could declare the different use cases and it's driven conditions, using rules in a declarative fashion (that is, semantic programming), being easily read, changed or updated. Also we could filter the cases using the same rules.

At that time (2003 I think it was) the best open source option was Drools (http://labs.jboss.com/drools/) and still is in my opinion. JRules from iLog, it´s a very good one rules engine but it´s a commercial option though.

I starting using rules engines over the years, collecting a few utility/helper classes.Then last year after the summer, I started working with these classes expanding them with a lot of improvements and concepts, always having Drools 3 as a core.

Then Drools 4 was released, and it had some of the concepts and improvements I´d already added :D to my little framework (well done guys! by the way). For example, changing the concept of WorkingMemory to RulesSession (stateless & stateful). I got something similar, but I went further creating the SemanticSession, a concept that I´ll explain latter.

Anyway, at that point I decided:

• first of all, to create an agnostic and simplified API, with the most common features that anyone would use (based in my own experience) and not related to a specific rules engine. It also expands some of the concepts and features. This API would become the jSemanticCore package.
• Second of all, to create an implementation based on Drools 4, using its new features and adding/removing others. Also it implements the new concepts, as the SemanticSession, SemanticContext, KnowledgeDatabase etc. This would become the jServiceRules package.
• And finally, a support package that provides integration classes for Spring, Hibernate, Mule etc..

I will be releasing all this packages the next 2 weeks through http://code.google.com/p/jservicerules/, in a alpha/beta state. Also, I will be publishing entries in the blog explaining how to use it, technical aspects and examples.