Aiding the Development of Active Applications

Active applications are characterized by the need for expressing, evaluating, and maintaining a set of rules that implement the application’s active behavior. Typically, rules follow the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) paradigm, yet oftentimes their actual implementation is buried in the application code, as their enactment requires a tight integration with the concepts and modules of the application. In this article, we propose a rule management system that allows developers to easily expand its rule processing logic with such concepts and modules and, hence, to decouple the management of their active rules from the application code. Our system derives from an exception manager that has previously been developed in the context of an industry-scale workflow management system and effectively allows developers to separate active and non-active design concerns