Version 12

    Here are some ideas that we had during the development of Tohu version 1.0 which haven't yet made it in:

     

    • Nice integration with Guvnor/BRMS for authoring.
    • Nice integration with decision tables (spreadsheets) for authoring.
    • Other UI layers aside from HTML/JQuery. e.g. Eclipse Rich Client, JSF client. (work has started on this)
    • Allow multiple answers for a MultipleChoiceQuestion.
    • Reduce chattiness by caching answers on the client and sending in batch if it can be determined that they won't affect the rules (this should be possible via the Drools API).  (Probably not much point in doing this with improvements in internet speeds.  Everything else on the web is chatty these days.)
    • Proper support for file upload to some arbitrary CMS (with only the file URL actually stored in the rule facts rather than the file contents).
    • Support for arbitrarily large reference data lookups e.g. using predictive text. (The current workaround for this is to do it hierarchically with multiple questions.)
    • Other built-in data types e.g. time. (Currently supports text, number, decimal, boolean, and date, but all of these can be subtyped by a developer.)
    • Maven archetype for building a new Tohu project
    • Provide a cleaner separation between Tohu and Drools so that Tohu could be used with other rules engines too. (While I think Drools rocks, the commerical reality is that people may already be using other rules engines and wish to leverage their existing business rules.)
    • Generic Tohu portlet. i.e. a generic war file that can be deployed to a portal and then configured as required to show ANY Tohu form without the need to rebuild it at all.  See https://issues.jboss.org/browse/TOHU-36  (See liferay-example as a simple step towards this goal)

    Feel free to add ideas to this list or raise them as suggestions in Jira (https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/TOHU).  Or if you'd like to contribute then please let us know as we have more detailed background on most of these ideas.