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Everything you need to write and run your first rules.

Prerequisites​

  1. An IDE — VS Code (preferred), IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse.
  2. JDK 21 (preferred) or JDK 17 — Temurin works well.
  3. Maven 3.9+ — Apache Maven.

Step by step​

  1. Understand what Drools is — what a rule engine does, and when declarative rules beat imperative code.
  2. Build your first rule project — create a Maven project from an archetype, write your first DRL rules and run them from a test, in either the rule unit or the traditional style.
  3. Build your first decision service — the Traffic Violation example: model decision requirements, decision tables and custom data types in DMN, then evaluate them from your application.

From here, the reference manual covers the rule engine, the rule language and DMN in depth, published with every Apache KIE release.