Rules based policy engine

Alex Kavanagh alex at ajkavanagh.co.uk
Fri Jul 18 11:33:01 CEST 2008



matt joyce wrote, On 18/07/08 00:01:
> I have always wanted many more features on my phone, than any phone I've 
> owned has provided.
> I expect the majority of people who are excited about Openmoko have 
> similar day dreams.
>   
Absolutely.  It was one of the reasons I wanted to go for a phone like
the FreeRunner.
> I'd like to propose a rule based policy engine.
> In essence this would be an event based system, a service that other 
> services could refer to, to influence their behaviour.
>   
Yes.  Off the top of my head, I'd quite like my phone, when I'm at home,
notify my MythTV box when a call or text message comes in.

[snip]
>
> It would be quite similar to rule based filters many email systems use 
> (outlook, thunderbird, gmail, procmail), or firewalls for that matter.
> Who knows, perhaps it could learn and suggest rules based on behaviour.
>
> I'm sure creative people can explore and extend this idea.
> Does anyone think this has merit, is achievable and worth pursuing?
>   
Yes, definitely.  Not know a great deal about how the FreeRunner
software is designed at the moment probably means that I would do a lot
of re-inventing the wheel.

However, I would've thought that if every application can generate and
consume 'events', then all that is needed in your policy app is the
ability to look for combinations of events (and/or states?) and generate
new events that other apps can pick up?  Is that what you were thinking.

This has the downside that all of the 'intelligence' is in an external
script/rules engine and not in the apps.  That might be an 'upside'. 
Alternatively, each 'rule' could be it's own script which waits on
certain events and then fires out new events that are picked up by the
other applications to do things.

Love the idea, though.

Cheers
Alex.

> Regards
>
> Matt
>
>
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