[susi22]

Has anybody in the client side community ever made the connection to rules engines? This flow of logic is awfully close to how a rule engine works. I wonder if people will at some point arrive at it.

There isn't a whole lot of rules engine in JS. Just nools [1] which is huge. I'd love to see a very simple forward chaining rule engine + Immutable + React and see how that would work out.

My guess is that they aren't popular at all because they have the notion of being enterprisey (Drools/Jboss). I'm a big fan of them. They /can/ make life & code very nice and elegant. Maybe somebody writes an JS adapter to clara rules [2].

[1] https://github.com/C2FO/nools

[2] https://github.com/rbrush/clara-rules

[saosebastiao]

I see some similarities with a stateful recursive Rete implementation. I still wouldn't go so far as to say that it is basically a rules engine.

The Rete algorithm (which is the underlying algorithm of most rule engines) trades off memory use for an O(1) execution time (where n==1 and n is the number of rules in the system). You really only gain any benefit once the number of rules grows significantly, and by then memory usage is significant enough that I wouldn't want it running in my browser. If I had a the need for a rule engine in the browser, I would invest most my effort on offloading rule processing to the server instead.

[feider]

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by rule engines.

I tried to use a FSM for a SPA that was developed with Backbone.js. First it was really useful, but it was really shitty to maintain(expanding etc), though that maybe was fault of implementation. Still it is interesting idea, that I might want to try again.