1. Kuali Rice: General Overview
Brian McGough
Kuali Rice Project Manager
Kuali Lead Architect
Director, Enterprise Software, IU
May 13, 2008

2. Why did we decide to build Rice Rice components brief overview
Agenda
Mission
Why did we decide to build Rice
Rice components brief overview
Acronym Familiarization
What’s coming next

3. Kuali Rice Mission
First and foremost to provide a consistent development framework and common middleware layer for Kuali Foundation based applications to leverage

4. Implementing intuitions? The kuali foundation? Partners?
Who Cares?
The users?
Implementing intuitions?
The kuali foundation?
Partners?
Commercial Affiliates?
Programmers?
Designers?
Functional experts?
Maybe
We All
Do?
Users would care about things like common look and feel across Kuali applications. Once comfortable in one Kuali based application a user should be able to pick up the next one even more quickly.
Implementing institutions would care for many reasons, they need to recruit and retain staff that are knowledgeable in a set of tools to do their jobs, and it is to their advantage if many of their systems are developed and maintained in similar and consistent ways.
The Kuali Foundation would care so that they are presenting a unified product offering to the world, in addition they need to continually recruit and retain staff on the basis of commitments from institutions, and if the projects are very similar then a standard set of training and skills can be provide leverage in terms of economies of scale.
Partners would care in order to ensure that maintenance and supportability is increased by consistent solution sets, and collectively by developing a larger contributor base.
Commercial affiliates, would like to be able to learn the core of the system once, understand how to leverage the various API’s of Kuali applications so that they can implement the desired solution for a client with greater speed and increased consistency.
Programmers, it varies, for those that like some ground rules it is good, for those that don’t in hinders their ability to innovate, although this is really only an illusion as all well thought out enhancement proposals for Rice as a whole are taken under consideration for implementation.
Designers of a system, again as programmers, some like boundaries, others do not, but at the end of the day we don’t build systems for the designers nor the programmers, we build them for the end users and stakeholders.
Functional experts would not care that much, except for the fact that once developers are proficient in the frameworks and integration, that they can get a lot more out of their developers.

5. 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

6. Kuali Rice is the sum of its parts
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)

7. 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

8. Shared consistent solutions:
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

9. KSB Overview - The Goals
Enable applications and services deployed on the bus to interact with other applications and services
Provide (a)synchronous communication
Provide flexible security
Provide Quality of Service (QoS)
Keep it simple (light weight)

10. A common registry of services
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

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

13. 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

14. More Core Concepts / Features
KNS Overview Cont.
More Core Concepts / Features
Transactional documents
Maintenance documents
Inquires
Lookups
Rules
Questions
Data dictionary

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. KEN Overview Cont.
Provides a secure and controlled environment for notifying the masses
Eliminate sifting through
Communication broker which provides any combination of action list, text messages, , etc...
Audit trail just as in KEW

19. 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

20. KIM Overview Cont. Basic concepts Namespace Person Group Permissions
Roles
Qualified Roles

21. Kim Overview Cont.

22. 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 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

23. Kuali Rice - Current Status
Public beta version available at --> Download
Rice is in development and early testing
Shipping with built in mysql support
Rice scope is being planned
Rice 1.0 expected mid next year

24. The Rice Interactive Diagram
Available at
Click anywhere on the diagram to begin
Click on any component for details

25. Documentation is a weakness
About the website
The main Rice web site
Sign up for our public mailing list
Access to our wiki: roadmap, project plans, documentation, etc
Documentation is a weakness

26. The Rice Team Current Core Contributors Past 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

27. Future Contributors

28. General introduction to rice components What’s coming next
Wrap Up
The mission
Why Build Rice
General introduction to rice components
Acronym Familiarization
What’s coming next

29. That’s it!
Q & A