Sorry for the posting hiatus, but we’ve been very busy recently working on the next major JRules release: JRules 7. One of the new features we are implementing at the moment within the Rule Studio for Java team is a vastly improved user interface for static rule analysis.

The goals for the user interface are:

• Improve the accessibly of static rule analysis, by providing a dedicated Eclipse view
• Easy analysis of multiple rule projects, with different static analysis options
• Automatically trigger static analysis when a rule artifact is edited
• Hyperlink from static analysis results to the “guilty” rule artifacts
• Improved management of potentially long-running static analysis jobs

The new static analysis view complements the HTML report for static analysis provided in JRules 6.x. The HTML report can be used for governance reporting or to export static analysis results to a file, while the view provides interactive feedback during rule authoring. As soon as a rule is edited static analysis can be triggered and any warnings or errors are displayed within the static analysis view.

Static analysis uses the Eclipse Job Manager, allowing both monitoring and cancellation of potentially long-running static analysis jobs.

Analysis results can be expanded and collapsed and hyperlinks are provided to navigate to the rule artifacts. The static analysis options can be edited at any time using the options panel to the right of the results.

An instance of the Static Analysis view is configured to use a Rule Project and optionally an Extractor as the source of the rules to be analyzed.

Of course we are not finished yet, and there will doubtless be some changes prior to the final release, but if you have comments (positive or negative) the team would love to hear them.