In a nutshell OpenLexicon is a Business Rules and Business Process engine that is designed to help produce applications in the shortest time possible. In some cases OpenLexicon may be able to completely satisfy the requirements of an application. In other cases it may be necessary to combine custom code and functionality with OpenLexicon’s Business Rules. This is done by defining individual data elements, and organizing them into an object hierarchy. Once the object structure is complete, business rules that manipulate and validate data attributes can be defined. OpenLexicon’s process management allows you to define more complex behavior for your application.

The hope is that with OpenLexicon, you can cut out some of the middlemen between you and the customer, give the customer something to evaluate at in as short a time as possible, and work towards the customer’s needs as quickly and accurately as possible.

OpenLexicon is the Best tool for Rapid Application Development! 

Suppose you are developing an application where one of the business rules is that a customer must have prepaid for their order. Your application probably has a method named something like ‘isPrePaid’ that returns a Boolean. Likewise you probably have an if-statement that only continues order processing if the order is prepaid (or returns an error if the order isn’t prepaid, etc.). Suppose the customer guiding the requirements later institutes a new payment method where an order can be processed on credit. Now, even though you’ve followed good design methods you will still need at some point to find the if-statement that is governing the order behavior and change it. This will of course require you to recompile and redeploy the entire application. In OpenLexicon, all you need to do is edit the one business rule that governs the order behavior, edit it, generate a new metadata cache file, and deploy only that cache file. It is much easier to track and change application behavior with OpenLexicon than it is with source code.

How do I get started?

There is a simple, easy installer included on this site for all registered users. You can even install OpenLexicon on a TomCat server. To do this, it is probably best to have your environment setup first. You will need to have a recent Java SDK installed, and you will need access to an Oracle or MySQL database. Depending on what functionality you need, you may also need access to a webserver. See the Downloads page for a detailed installation guide.

We already have specialized code to handle our most complicated business rules. How can we keep using this software?

This is the same situation we found ourselves in. There’s a lot of basic data manipulation and validation that developers get tired of writing. This is what OpenLexicon is designed to automate. There is also a lot of very specialized and complicated implementations that take a lot of money to develop and test. OpenLexicon is not designed to try to replace this sort of software. OpenLexicon doesn’t need total control over your data flow to work properly - it is very likely that you can use a modular design approach and let OpenLexicon handle the basic business rules and your own software to handle the non-automatable tasks.