Haley Systems Advances Business Rule Implementation Standards for JSR-94; Haley Rules Markup Language Provides First Practical Way to Interchange Rule Engine-Independent Syntax through JSR-94 Compliant API.

PITTSBURGH -- As part of a major new initiative to promote industry standards for rules interchange, Haley Systems, Inc., a leading provider of business rules management systems, today introduced the Haley Rules Markup Language, a schema for specifying business rules in XML. The company also announced its immediate support for the JSR-94 specification for the Java Rule Engine API through its rules engine, HaleyRules-JP 5.3. Haley Systems is the first business rules vendor to advance the practical use of JSR-94 by providing a corresponding standard rules syntax.

"Haley is committed not only to supporting standards for rules interchange, but also to helping move them forward. With this announcement, we are the first business rules vendor to advance the practical use of the JSR-94 standard," said Haley President and CEO Hans Witt. "We are delivering what was until now the key missing ingredient for JSR-94 - rules syntax definitions. This is a major step forward toward making business rules ubiquitous."

The XML Schema Definition (XSD) for Haley's HRML specifies the syntax of rules as supported by both HaleyRules engines and the popular Eclipse language. With HRML and Haley's JSR-94 implementation, developers using either HaleyAuthority or Eclipse can generate JSR-94-compliant code that runs against the HaleyRules engine or any Eclipse-compatible rules engine.

"We are not surprised to see business rules vendors moving in the direction of vendor neutrality and rules interchange," said Jim Sinur, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Proprietary APIs have been holding back business rules from more widespread adoption. For business rules systems to fulfill their market potential, eventually they will need to be as widely supported and interchangeable as processes and databases."

The source code for Haley's JSR-94 implementation and the XSD for HRML are publicly available on Haley's Web site. Also available for review and download is the documentation and heavily commented source code for JSR-94. HaleyRules-JP supporting JSR-94 and HRML is available for download and free use for research and educational purposes by non-profit educational institutions.

JSR-94, developed through the Java Community Process (JCP) program, defines a Java runtime API for rule engines by providing a simple API to access a rule engine from a Java Platform, Standard Edition or a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition client. While it provides guidelines for the APIs, JSR-94 does not define how rules are constructed or manipulated.

Commented Paul Haley, founder, EVP and CTO of Haley Systems, "We are making HRML available to the rules community with the full intent of supporting it in combination with JSR-94 and across open source rules engines and other, emerging rule standards and the efforts of the W3C Working Group on Rules Interchange Format. Our hope is to help jump-start widespread adoption of the standard by making this syntax for implementing JSR-94 available as much as a year before the release of the W3C spec."

About Haley Systems

Founded in 1989, Haley Systems, Inc. is the first business rules management system (BRMS) vendor to address the demanding needs of dynamic enterprises that require frequent and rapid changes to complex business processes and rules. The Haley Business Rules Management Suite is the only BRMS on the market to combine high-performance, rules-based processing with natural English language understanding. Haley customers use plain English to automate business rules in their strategic software applications. By empowering business users to manage business rules and decisions directly from their desktop, Haley eliminates the IT bottleneck caused by dependency on programmer intervention to create and maintain rules. Haley users gain dramatically reduced rule change cycle times, resulting in several competitive advantages, including improved customer responsiveness, enhanced revenue opportunities, faster time-to-market and reduced IT costs. Major Global 1000 companies such as Adobe, Cigna, BUPA, KPN and One Beacon Insurance, as well as government organizations including the U.S. Army, and the Department of Labor rely on Haley products. Based in Pittsburgh, Pa., Haley is privately held, with venture capital backing from Pequot Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures, LP, and PA Early Stage. For more information on Haley Systems, visit www.haley.com.

HaleyAuthority and HaleyRules are trademarks of Haley Systems, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.