The paper's title: Rule Object: A Pattern Language for Adaptable and Scalable Business Rule Construction Author's name(s). Ali Arsanjani Email addresses for all authors. arsanjan@us.ibm.com Postal address for the primary contact. 105 North D St., Fairfield, IA 52556 Phone number for the primary contact. (515) 556-5526. An abstract for the submission Abstract ======== Rules are changing everyday in the face of rapidly volatile business requirements. How do we handle this change while keeping our systems efficiently maintainable, reusable and extensible? How do we model and handle (represent) rules, for greater reuse, maintainability, performance? Business rules tend to change more frequently than the rest of the business object with which they are associated. These rules are typically implemented within the rule methods of a business object. Rules also refer to other business objects that their encompassing business object associates with; creating a web of implicit and increasingly unmaintainable dependencies. Thus, changing a business rule can impact the set of objects dependent upon that rule. Entropy increases even more when the code that is implementing a rule is scattered across several methods within a class, or across several methods of collaborating classes. This lack of centralization leads to ripple effects; the impact of changing a rule’s constituent if-else statements leads to side-effects. The Rule Object Pattern Language contains eighteen patterns, which, for brevity have been excluded from our discussion . We have included only the major one, Rule Object and have mentioned two others, Assessor and Action, that are intimately related to Rule Object. This pattern language balances the forces in the above problem domain by providing a sequential unfoldment of a set of patterns that address the increasing need for handling scalability, adaptability and complexity. The Rule Object pattern language can best be seen to resolve forces in the greater context of the Service Provider domain pattern [Presented at PLoP'99].