clara-storm was an experiment in distributing production rule working memory in storm, but has not been maintained and may not work against newer versions of either Clara or Storm.

Of course, users may use Clara as a library with Storm -- or any other JVM-based system -- but this project has been tabled due to lack of time. I can imagine it be resurrected in the future in some updated form but there are no immediate plans to do so.

A proof-of-concept Clara Rules host that allows running of rules over a the Storm processing system.

See the Clara Rules documentation for an understanding of the rules engine itself. This project distributes the engine's working memory across a Storm topology, making it possible to scale and process very large data streams with simple, declarative rules.

Clara makes distributed rules possible with some simple constraints in the engine itself. First, all facts used by Clara are immutable, which greatly simplifies sharing in a distributed environment

Second, Clara requires that all joins between facts are hash-based. For instance, if I want to join a TemperatureReading fact and a Location fact, they must share a field that can be joined. The clara-storm host will route all join operations with matching fact bindings to the same bolt, so the join can occur there. The sensors example shows such joins in action.

This project models a distributed-memory rules engine in Storm by simply splitting it across an arbitrarily large number of clara-bolts. These bolts each hold a subset of the working memory, split up by hashing the fields that are used in rule joins. If a rule or constraint fires that creates new join values, they are sent to the appropriate clara-bolt instance that contains that subset of the working memory.

The result is a processing topology that is somewhat atypical for Storm: rather than a deep graph of processing steps, we have a large number of peer clara-bolts responsible for a subset of data. These peers then share the output of their processing with eachother based on the hash-based joins.

This is a proof-of-concept to exercise Clara over distributed systems. Usage information will come as this project progresses.

Copyright © 2013 Ryan Brush

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.