The design and implementation of business rules in objectoriented applications and in component-based systems should provide the development team the ability to rapidly and efficiently make necessary changes to the existing business rules based on changes in the business requirements, technical infrastructure and operational nature of the business. This process is typically a complicated mix of conflicting decisions that need to be balanced according to the non-functional requirements of the project as well as the functional requirements imposed on it. We examine the key decision points and trade-offs for modeling, designing and implementing business rules within object-oriented and component-based applications.
We explore a pattern language that has been successfully applied to real client projects to make applications resilient to the volatility of business requirements and business process and rule changes that are made to match the competition, better improve the business operation, provide greater marketshare or in response to legislation or de-regulation. Rules live at mutlpie tiers in an n-tiered e-business application; we explore thebest-practices of creating and placing these rules at adative locations in the software system to support component-based systems through software contracts. '