Part 2: Jess: A rule-based programming environment

If you’re going to develop rule-based systems, first you’ll need to pick a rule engine. For the rest of this book, you’ll be working with the Jess rule engine that you first met in chapter 1. In chapter 3, you’ll learn about Jess’s origins, how to get a copy, and how to write the Jess version of the famous “Hello, World” program. In the next few chapters, you’ll learn a lot about writing programs in Jess’s rule language. Chapter 4 is a general introduction to the Jess language. Chapter 5 teaches you how to work with Java objects from Jess programs. The next two chapters talk about Jess’s working memory and how to write rules, respectively. Finally, chapter 8 explains some of the nuts and bolts that make Jess work. All together, part 2 of this book is a comprehensive tutorial on both the Jess language and the Jess rule engine; it will get you ready to start developing rule-based applications in part 3.