Abstract: A high performance Rule Engine, capable of handling interactions and dependencies within a system. A system, such as a provisioning system for customer care, contains many pieces of interdependent Data. The Rule Engine uses Rule Objects that only need to know hoe to understand and apply a very specific type of Rule from a Rule set. This minimizes the need to parse and interpret a complex all-purpose Rule language. Each Rule Object can be linked together to form a list of Rules emanating from a Business Rule Coordinator Objects. Moreover, each Rule Object is loaded with a operator, such as a conditional operator, at startup, after which the conditional operator does not need to change and the Rule Object hierarchy can be kept active in memory.

Abstract: A method, and computer readable medium for control of data in a caching application. An indexed list of a type is used to hold cache elements for ease of lookup while a linked usage list is maintained for the Most Recently Used/Least Recently Used elements. Pointers between the lists are also maintained. This allows the cache to find both a specific entry if it exists and if it does not, and in the latter case the LRU element can be located without the need for a sequential search. Each element in the linked list holds a pointer to a cache element in the, and each cache element record in the indexed list also holds a pointer to its corresponding record in the linked list, in addition to the actual cached data.