Hi All,
We are evaluating camunda DMN vs Drools DMN. Appreciate your help, if any one of you have already done evaluation and share differences, similarities.
I see lot of similar topics posted in this forum, but couldn’t find any differences/similarities.
Hi - we are doing same right now! So let’s share our findings.
I have finished evaluating the basic Camunda demos for BPMN and DMN, and am now looking to integrate a simple Drools scenario - that way can have the advantage of both. I have read recently that this is possible.
Hello there folks,
Sadly i haven’t used Drools in a long while so I’m not sure what the current engine is capable of.
I had a quick glace at the docs and it looks like Drools also implements DMN + FEEL so in terms of under the hood capabilities they could be very similar.
So without a deep dive into the difference i would say the clearest one is that DMN and FEEL within Camunda is a heavily integrated component of Camunda’s BPMN engine. So while you could use just the DMN engine as an independent service you can also use it as part of a series of orchestrated services modeled in BPMN. This would offer you a lot more over sight on how your rules affect how systems might proceed and based on the results produced by the DMN tables
My memory of Drools is that it was quite hard to get setup and running as a service (that might have changed ) The Camunda DMN engine it’s basically just a dependancy that you can add to an existing project so it’s REALLY easy to either embed in your project or deploy as a java service in something like a spring boot application.
Hope that helps!
Also - I’d be delighted to hear your findings
Thanks again Niall for a truly insightful response. I totally agree about Drools - the industry started moving away in 2015 from ‘when->then’ semantic to DMN+FEEL, and integrated into BPMN flow with appropriate XOR gateways, this seems like picking a Tesla over a Tractor.
Now, if only I could respond to my colleagues that are evangelizing ‘OpenRules’ - not much out there on the web about diffs btw. Camunda and OpenRules. Our company does not need the focus on using Excel or Google sheets as a front-end, and although appropriate scalability architecturally is important, we do not need millions of rules executing in seconds.
Our primary need is agility for developers, and adaptability/extensibility in edge use-cases where necessary (e.g. at time a specialized AI/ML decision) … I have found so far that Camunda can drop into java when necessary for these kinds of specialized services.