Highly scalable and dynamic "rule-based" applications?
- by Prof Plum
For a large enterprise app, everyone knows that being able to adjust to change is one of the most important aspects of design. I use a rule-based approach a lot of the time to deal with changing business logic, with each rule being stored in a DB. This allows for easy changes to be made without diving into nasty details. Now since C# cannot Eval("foo(bar);") this is accomplished by using formatted strings stored in rows that are then processed in JavaScript at runtime. This works fine, however, it is less than elegant, and would not be the most enjoyable for anyone else to pick up on once it becomes legacy.
Is there a more elegant solution to this? When you get into thousands of rules that change fairly frequently it becomes a real bear, but this cannot be that uncommon of a problem that someone has not thought of a better way to do this. Any suggestions? Is this current method defensible? What are the alternatives?
Edit: Just to clarify, this is a large enterprise app, so no matter which solution works, there will be plenty of people constantly maintaining its rules and data (around 10). Also, The data changes frequently enough to say that some sort of centralized server system is basically a must.
