Rules engines vs traditional programming

I recently stumbled on a video of someone creating a Pong style game using the DROOLS rules engine. I am not an expert in DROOLS but I keep encountering applications which I think could have been created using DROOLS. By traditional applications I mean coded in a sequential style using typical techniques. DROOLS is a system where you created small modules of code and then group them together in a fashion very similar to that of a Unix pipeline. An advantage of a rules engine is that most of the software coding would be performed early on and then the rules are created and modified ideally without modifying any code. An advantage of this style of programming is that deployments become configuration changes rather than code changes. The challenge of this area is in familiarity as well and how to convey the value of this approach to people with no background knowledge in it. The DROOLS Pong game video can be found at .