RuleBox: A Rule Engine For ColdBox & BoxLang Applications

RuleBox is a modern, intuitive, natural-language rules engine for BoxLang and ColdBox applications.

Tired of classes filled with if/then/else statements? Need a nice abstraction that decouples rules from each other and lets you write them the same way you write the rest of your BoxLang? RuleBox is right for you. Rules are written in an expressive, dynamic Domain Specific Language modeled closely after the Given-When-Then methodology.

🔋 Features

• Natural-language rules engine for BoxLang and ColdBox applications.
• Decouples rules from each other for better maintainability.
• Expressive, dynamic Domain Specific Language (DSL) modeled after Given-When-Then.
• Visualizer dashboard for dry-run, metrics, and live tracking.
• Supports external rules from JSON, YAML, or a database.
• Declared facts: a RuleBook can list the facts it takes, with types, defaults and descriptions, and optionally enforce them.
• Thread-safe and robust error handling.

📖 Documentation

Full documentation, guides, and the complete DSL reference at: https://rulebox.coldbox.org

The site covers everything: getting started, defining RuleBooks, the given/when/except/then/using/stop DSL, facts and results, the Builder, rule auditing, thread safety, error handling, and a full worked example - versioned, so the 1.0.0 docs stay right where they were.

• Tutorial Course: a step-by-step course from your first rule to the Visualizer.
• Declaring Facts: document the facts a RuleBook takes, and enforce them if you want.
• External Rules: load rules from JSON, YAML, or a database.
• Visualizer: a dashboard, dry-run playground, metrics, and a live tracker.

Requirements

• BoxLang 1.18+
• ColdBox 8+
• CommandBox 7.x (bx-cli module for BoxLang)

Installation

In your ColdBox application run this within the CommandBox shell:

box install rulebox

Optionally, if you will be using YAML rules or our SQL metrics store:

• YAML rule files: box install bx-yaml
• Visualizer metrics that survive a restart (SQLiteMetricsStore): box install bx-sqlite, plus a datasource

box install bx-yaml, bx-sqlite

Or open your server.json and add them in the installScripts section:

"scripts":{
	"onServerInitialInstall":"install bx-esapi,bx-yaml,bx-sqlite --noSave"
}

License

Apache License, Version 2.0.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

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