Akka.net VS RulesEngine

akka.net actors. Actors all the way! https://getakka.net

If it's the former you may want to take a look at something like the actor model akka.net with persistent actors (https://getakka.net/articles/persistence/architecture.html). No need of an external message broker or mass transit (which is a wrapper over different message brokers). You could use sqllite for persisting the actors state to recover in case of a restart.

Spring and Hibernate are the goto libraries in Java land and I suspect that's the primary motivation for your colleague's recommendations. It's quite easy to bulldoze someone less experienced with your ideas so be careful of that. I'd avoid both. They aren't bad libraries at all but they have a 'legacy' feel and it will make your application less future proof. Would a distributed system be viable? If so then I'd recommend Akka, there'a .NET port of it that's well supported and maintained.

Is akka a good alternative?

However, I've found that sometimes, they are a little -too- functional. I'm a bit more preferential to Akka.Net's implementation of Option and Try, if only because they have good 'escape hatches' where you interrogate them in a more procedural manner.

This project is also what ultimately led to the creation of Akka.NET - I wrote an overview on how our application was built here: https://aaronstannard.com/markedup-akkadotnet/

You may also want to take a look at queues (e.g. RabbitMQ) or even something like Akka.NET or Microsoft Orleans.

From the title I immediately thought AKKA.NET or Orleans

Check out the Microsoft Rules Engine. Source: am contributor and wrote a Blazor editor for it

Might be worth checking out the Microsoft Rules Engine. It's part of the Microsoft Open Source libraries, which I think come from their employees.

I am using Microsoft's library to create rules. If anyone has used this library could you give a hint if it is possible to write a rule with different output based on an input?

Looking around I found this https://github.com/microsoft/RulesEngine and it looks like it could be the magic bullet. I see input (Event), a workflow defined in JSON (user defined rules), and a result that indicates the success/failure. From there we have what we need to determine the appropriate action(s) that can be dynamically defined.

Searching around I found the concept of Business Rules Engines. Specifically, this dotnet iteration - https://github.com/microsoft/RulesEngine. Thought it doesn't solve all my issues, the concept does look like it will solve some of the more problematic customer specific rules like commissions and pricing. Does anyone have experience and/or provide their two cents?

From the documentation for Microsoft RulesEngine, it seems like RulesEngine is focused on generating UI/form validation logic. Is that right? Does it also support using rules against a LINQ provider and pushing Rules down into the underlying query (i.e. generating SQL where clauses based on rules)?