It’s been a good few weeks for stories and information about JBoss Rules and Drools, the open source project upstream of the JBoss subscription offering. Here is a quick summary of the recent stories. Post a comment if you know of any others we all should pay attention to.

• Pierre Fricke, JBoss product manager, writes about Daiwa Securities America Improves Performance and Reduces Costs with JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. The Red Hat press release says, “In addition to the (JBoss) Portal Platform, Daiwa also uses the JBoss Rules framework to embed alerts into portal applications.”
• Two articles on Drools were published in Red Hat Magazine, Introduction to Drools: Rules fall from your eyes and JBoss Drools meets Hibernate. Both pieces are a good introduction to working with Drools.
• Drools continues to grow its library of widgets for the Guv’nor, which is the web tool and rules repository of Drools, formerly known just as the “Drools BRMS.” This new widget, rolodex, adds a flipping slideshow of photos pulled using Google Web Toolkit.
• A beta implementation of WordNet for Drools is being talked up by project lead Mark Proctor; they are seeking comments from users/testers in the Drools mailing list.
• Mark Proctor also writes, “We often get asked about Drools scalability in complex apps, so I thought I would link to this posting just done, where someone has Drools scaling to 900K facts on a 64bit JVM with reasonable performance.”
• More tools and features are being included in Drools all the time, such as adding Smooks as a data loader.

Just completed a great session with Emmanuel Bernard on Hibernate Search. Emmanuel is engaging as a speaker, and his demonstrating adding Hibernate Search capabilities to a web store in 15, well, 17 minutes was fun and informative. We got good multimedia coverage of this one (finally!), results featured here in the near future.

Right now I’m sitting in Max Katz’s talk on Developing Rich Internet Applications with JBoss RichFaces. Similar to what I’ve seen many times in the last few days, Max is doing a live demonstration using JBoss Developer Studio (the subscription version of JBoss Tools), writing a building up an application using JSF and RichFaces. It’s great to see a roomful of attention on these tools that were open sourced by Exadel and Red Hat.

Christian presents a nice introduction to JBoss Seam (and Hibernate et al) in this video of his talk at Grails eXchange 2007.

As he says in his blog entry about the talk:

I need to mention that I spent more time on JSF and EJB3 than usual because nobody in the room knew much about them (it was a Grails conference, after all). So if you just want to know something about Seam – and again, all quite basic – skip half an hour into the video.

The video does not show any of the slides that Christian presented. You can grab a PDF of the slides and follow along. The first five slides are introductory and background of JSF and EJB3, with the technical breakdown beginning on slide 6. If you lose track of which slide he is on, look for when the video camera captures a piece of the slide. Christian’s blog comments mentions he’ll try to merge the video and slides into a new version, which we’ll use to update this post.