Am I missing something or is this just another rules engine?
Twitter is also just another rules engine, with pretty simple rules about which tweets you receive. And yet it's also so much more. It's a platform, and it's a social network. And it's something that many people love to use.
Who cares if it's just another rules engine under the hood?
Rules engines are typically a terrible idea and I say this as someone who has worked at two large corporations, one a bank, where rules engines were heavily used so they could avoid having the larger development staff they really needed. Rules engines fail miserably every single time and eventually have to be replaced.
The problem is that as time goes on people who don't know any better end up writing larger and more complex rules and workflows without an understanding of the side effects those rules generate. The end result inevitably becomes a huge mess that is extremely fragile and nearly impossible to follow.
...not that my hypothetical rule is useful, but you understand what I'm getting at.
Typically what happens is that business discovers they can now implement every last feature they desire without getting any push back from engineering so they go wild implementing new features without realizing the consequences. There is no VCS, no QA, no testing. There is no one telling them they cannot do something because it won't scale, it isn't secure or it won't be maintainable.
Their only metric for success is that they get the result they want now and the long term consequences be damned. Worse yet, every single person using the rules engine is acting independently and not as a team. There is no code review, when the rule works to their satisfaction it gets pushed into production.
At first everything works fine and people get promoted for saving money on engineering costs but then the rules start getting more complex, start becoming composed of other rules, need to have more complex actions or need to integrate with third party systems. Eventually the simple rules engine turns into a bastardized programming language that everyone adds onto and never modifies because no one understands how a modification will affect the 4000 other rules in the engine. At that point you end up having to do a complete re-write, which is something I have had the displeasure of doing in the past.
Typically, by the time you get the dev team to fully implement the solution, it has missed its mark and the analysts have moved on.
Players in the mashup landscape are "trying" to provide scalable and robust, yet flexible and easy-to-use systems.
plug - flowreports.co is one of these ... and it can be self-hosted.