Hotel Booking

Build a hotel booking application using the Business Rules service in IBM Cloud

The Business Rules service hosted in IBM Cloud and powered by Operational Decision Manager allows you to define, deploy, and maintain business rules and policies in a RuleApp separate from your application code, providing greater application agility. You can update the business logic in the RuleApp and redeploy it without any change to the booking application, spending less time recoding and testing business policy changes such as pricing calculation, eligibility determination or credit approvals.

To demonstrate the benefits of decoupling the business logic from the lifecycle of a calling application running in the cloud, we'll walk you through the steps to build a sample application that takes advantage of the Business Rules service. You will then be able to extend this application with more complex rules or build your own application very easily.

This sample booking application shows the possibilities of integrating the Business Rules service with a Node.js application in the cloud, while also taking advantage of the ease of deployment and the scalability of the IBM Cloud platform.

Our sample application is for a hotel chain that is building its reservation system and wants to provide its clients with an application to search for and book rooms. The owners of the hotel need to define various business policies to calculate booking rates, such as early booking discounts or last-minute offers. They may need to modify these policies to adapt to different travel seasons and exceptional events, for example. They may also want to add more policies in the future on special offers or loyalty programs.

To accomplish all this, we'll build an application with Node.js and use the Business Rules service to easily manage and execute the business rules that define these policies. Meanwhile, we also take advantage of the ease of deployment and the scalability of the IBM Cloud platform

What you will need for your application

Familiarity with Node.js.

Some Node.js modules: Express framework, EJS, async.

Basic knowledge of HTML and Bootstrap 3 CSS.

Basic knowledge of IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) (recommended).

The Eclipse Juno 4.2.2 IDE for Java EE Developers. Install the Rule Designer plugins for the Business Rules service.

Build the hotel booking app

Step 1. Create a Business Rules service instance in IBM Cloud

From the IBM Cloud catalog, click the Business Rules service.

Step 2. Define your application business logic with Rule Designer

In this step, you will go through the core concepts and activities for authoring business rules in Rule Designer. However, the focus of this article is not to provide detailed explanations about this;

Step 3. Deploy your business logic to the Business Rules service in IBM Cloud

Before proceeding with this step, you may want to familiarize yourself with the deployment architecture of a business rule application:

Conclusion

The Business Rules service allows you to separate business logic and application logic for greater application agility. You can update the business logic then redeploy the RuleApp without any change to the booking application. Therefore, you spend less time recoding and testing when business policy changes, such as pricing calculation, eligibility determination or credit approvals. This sample booking application shows the possibilities of integrating the Business Rules service with a Node.js application in the cloud, while also taking advantage of the ease of deployment and the scalability of the IBM Cloud platform

What is the benefit of Decision Modeling in Management according to you?.