This is the second maintenance release of the 3.x line. It introduces a new module called easy-rules-support. This module contains support classes that were in the easy-rules-core module. For instance, the org.jeasy.rules.core.CompositeRule has been moved to easy-rules-support as org.jeasy.rules.support.CompositeRule and made abstract. 3 implementations of composite rules are now provided out of the box:

• UnitRuleGroup: All or nothing semantics (exactly the same as CompositeRule in previous versions)
• ActivationRuleGroup: XOR logic, ie only one rule of the group will be triggered (issue [#122])
• ConditionalRuleGroup: A primary rule acts as a precondition to trigger the rule group (issue [#130])

This release comes with other new features and some bug fixes:

Features

• Issue [#96]: Set priority through @Rule annotation
• Issue [#133]: Read YAML rule descriptor from a String
• Issue [#138]: Load multiple rules from a single yaml file

Bug fixes

• Issue [#139]: NPE If a null Fact is injected through annotation
• Issue [#143]: Proxy toString() is not equal to original object toString()
• Issue [#141]: NPE in MVELRuleDefinitionReader if rule name, description or priority is not specified

Deprecations

• Issue [#145]: Deprecate MVELRuleFactory#createRuleFrom(java.io.File). A new method that takes a java.io.Reader is to be used instead to be able to read rules not only from files (with a FileReader), but also from Strings (with a StringReader) or any other reader implementation.
• Issue [#122]: org.jeasy.rules.core.CompositeRule is deprecated. It has been moved to the new easy-rules-support module and is now abstract.

I would like to thank @dagframstad, @danrivcap, @bpoussin and @paulbrejla for their contributions to this release.