Kuali Rice: General Overview

Brian McGough

Kuali Rice Project Manager

Kuali Lead Architect

Director, Enterprise Software, IU

May 13, 2008

Agenda

• Mission

• Why did we decide to build Rice

• Rice components brief overview– Acronym Familiarization

• What’s coming next

Kuali Rice Mission

• First and foremost to provide a consistent development framework and common middleware layer for Kuali Foundation based applications to leverage

MaybeWe All Do?

Who Cares?

• The users?• Implementing intuitions?• The kuali foundation?• Partners?• Commercial Affiliates?• Programmers?• Designers?• Functional experts?

Thinking Outside of the Wok

• Most administrative applications have a common needs for:– Screen Rendering/input– Data Validation & Saving– Workflow based processes– Business Rules– Integration with other systems

What is Rice?

• Kuali Rice is the sum of its parts– KSB (Kuali Service Bus)– KNS (Kuali Nervous System)– KEW (Kuali Enterprise Workflow)– KEN (Kuali Enterprise Notification)– KIM (Kuali Identity Management)

What do all these pieces of rice have in common?

• By themselves they don’t do much

• Leveraged in a context to add value

• What kinds of context?– Business Administration Apps– Student Apps– Research Apps– Arbitrary data collection Apps

How do these add value?

• Shared consistent solutions:– Allow developers to focus on business

functionality rather than how to achieve it technically.

– Allow for re-use so that the code base remains as small and maintainable as possible

– Example: On the Ford F-150, you have all kinds of options, but all models re-use many of the same parts and all look very similar

KSB Overview - The Goals

1. Enable applications and services deployed on the bus to interact with other applications and services

2. Provide (a)synchronous communication

3. Provide flexible security

4. Provide Quality of Service (QoS)

5. Keep it simple (light weight)

KSB

• A common registry of services– Lists all services on the bus and how they can

be connected– Through simple Spring configuration, Java

based services can be “exported” from a rice enabled application, which is then ready to be consumed by another application

KSB

• A common resource loading layer that provides access to services (bus or local)– Services can be local to the application, in

which case the bus is short circuited– Services can be remote, in which case the

bus is leveraged to ascertain the service endpoint

• For a closer look - http://ksb.kuali.org

KNS Overview

• Provides reusable code, shared services, integration layer, and a development strategy

• Provides a common look and feel through screen drawing framework

• A document (business process) centric model with workflow as a core concept

KNS Overview Cont.

• More Core Concepts / Features– Transactional documents– Maintenance documents– Inquires– Lookups– Rules– Questions– Data dictionary

KEW Overview

• Facilitates routing and approval of business processes throughout an organization

• Provides re-usable routing rule creation which defines how business processes should be routed

• Provides hooks for client applications to handle workflow lifecycle events of business processes

• Provides route log functionality for auditing and other purpouses

KEW Overview Cont.

• End users interact with central workflow GUIs for all client applications– Document Search: Allows users to search for

documents (business process transactions)– Action List: One place to go to find all

documents that you must take action on

KEN Overview

• Works with the action list to provide a single place for all university related communications– Workflow items come from KEW– Non-workflow items from KEN

• Non-workflow example items– Overdue library book– A concert on campus– Graduation checklists for seniors

KEN Overview Cont.

• Provides a secure and controlled environment for notifying the masses

• Eliminate sifting through email

• Communication broker which provides any combination of action list, text messages, email, etc...

• Audit trail just as in KEW

KIM Overview

• Consistent service interfaces used by all Kuali apps

• Leverages KNS and KEW to provide a reference implementation out of the box

• Flexibility for dynamic attribute associations with IdM entities (persons, groups, roles, etc)

• Pluggable support for Internet2 (Grouper, Signet, etc) products or other IDM tools

KIM Overview Cont.

• Basic concepts– Namespace– Person– Group– Permissions– Roles– Qualified Roles

Kim Overview Cont.

What’s Next? Looking to the Future…

• Rice components will piggy back on each other– KEW and KEN will use KNS to draw screens, etc.– KIM retrofitted back into Rice in 0.9.4 release

• Standards– JPA for data persistence (underway)– JSR 168/286 portlets for user interfaces (portals)– BPEL for process orchestration– WS-* support

• Easier configuration and turnkey upgrades• Light weight service interfaces (WSDL, XSD)• Open source ESB replacement for KSB

Kuali Rice - Current Status

• Public beta version 0.9.2.1 available at http://rice.kuali.org --> Download

• Rice 0.9.3 is in development and early testing– Shipping with built in mysql support

• Rice 0.9.4 scope is being planned• Rice 1.0 expected mid next year

The Rice Interactive Diagram

• Available at http://rice.kuali.org

• Click anywhere on the diagram to begin

• Click on any component for details

• The main Rice web site– http://rice.kuali.org– Sign up for our public mailing list– Access to our wiki: roadmap, project plans,

documentation, etc

• Documentation is a weakness

About the website

The Rice Team• Current Core Contributors

– Brian McGough - Indiana University– Aaron Godert - Cornell University– Nate Johnson - Indiana University– Eric Westfall - Indiana University– David Elyea - Indiana University– Aaron Hamid - Cornell University– Chi-Thanh Dang - University of Arizona

• Past Contributors– John Fereira - Cornell University– Phillip Berres - University of Southern California– Ryan Kirkendall - Indiana University– Scott Battaglia - Rutgers University– Tom Clark - Indiana University

Future Contributors

Wrap Up

• The mission

• Why Build Rice

• General introduction to rice components– Acronym Familiarization

• What’s coming next

That’s it!

• Q & A