On-Demand Business Rule Management Framework for SaaS Application

Abstract

SaaS (Software as a Service) is becoming a new direction of software industry in the new cloud computing era. SaaS applications and services must be able to react in a fast and flexible way to ever changing business situations, policies and products. In order to satisfy policy changes and other personalized requirements from different customers (ortenants), business rule management of SaaS needs to support multi-tenancy and online customization. This paper proposed a business rule engine based framework for managing and decoupling of business logic rule from SaaS application. It takes on-demand business rule management as an independent and online maintainable part of SaaS application, which could allow tenants to safely upgrade, delete or create rules during runtime. Finally, a practical case study in Attendance Management System (AMS) evaluates the effectiveness of the framework. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.