Rule services

The WebSphere Commerce uses rule services to support rule-based discounts.

A rule service exists in a one-to-one relationship with a store, containing the set of rule-based discounts. This design provides flexibility as each store's rule-based discounts can be started, stopped, and refreshed independent of every other service.

Each application clone, or Java Virtual Machine has a local instance of the rule server. While the need to communicate across application clone boundaries is minimal, there is one case where this is necessary: updating the status of a rule service. In order to receive a status report from each application clone, the system uses the Scheduler to broadcast a request to update the status of a rule service. The results are collected and displayed when the user presses the "View Status" button.