From Business Rules to Application Rules in Rich Internet Applications

The increase of digital bandwidth and computing power of personal computers as well as the rise of the Web 2.0 came along with a new Web programming paradigm: Rich Internet Applications. On the other hand, powerful server-side business rules engines appeared over the last years and let enterprises describe their business policies declaratively as business rules. This paper addresses the problem of how to combine the business rules approach with the new programming paradigm of Rich Internet Applications. We present a novel approach that reuses business rules for deriving declarative presentation and visualization logic. In this paper we discuss complex event processing as an essential requirement for rule-enabled Rich Internet Applications, and introduce a rule-based architecture capable of executing rules directly on the client. We propose to use declarative rules as platform independent model describing the application and presentation logic. By means of AJAX we exemplarily show how to automatically generate client-side executable rules with the aid of Rich Internet Application design patterns.