Jess (programming language)

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Jess is a rule engine for the Java computing platform, written in the Java programming language. It was developed by Ernest Friedman-Hill of Sandia National Laboratories.^[1] It is a superset of the CLIPS language.^[1] It was first written in late 1995.^[1] The language provides rule-based programming for the automation of an expert system, and is often termed as an expert system shell.^[1] In recent years, intelligent agent systems have also developed, which depend on a similar ability.

Rather than a procedural paradigm, where one program has a loop that is activated only one time, the declarative paradigm used by Jess applies a set of rules to a set of facts continuously by a process named pattern matching. Rules can modify the set of facts, or can execute any Java code. It uses the Rete algorithm^[1] to execute rules.