Technical Overview of Kuali Rice

UC Davis, Information & Educational Technology

January 2009

Agenda

• Overview of Rice

• Component Assessment

• Strategies for Adoption at UC Davis

• What’s Next for Rice at the Foundation?

Rice Mission

• “…to provide a consistent development framework and common middleware layer for Kuali Foundation based applications to leverage.”

Rice Components

• Rice components are the “glue” that tie the pieces of an enterprise application together

• KNS– Kuali Nervous System• KEW – Kuali Enterprise Workflow• KEN – Kuali Enterprise Notification • KSB – Kuali Service Bus• KIM – Kuali Identity Management

Value of Rice

1. Consistent interface for end user training

2. Increased developer productivity through consistency

3. Developers focus on business functionality – faster turn around

Value of Rice (con’t)

4. Infrastructure consistent across projects

5. Scalable through clustering

6. Power of community source

7. Highly productive development environmenta. For Kuali projectsb. For non-Kuali projects

Rice Maturity

Component Maturity

KNS(Kuali Nervous System)

Stable

KEW(Kuali Enterprise Workflow)

Stable

KEN(Kuali Enterprise Notification)

Initial Release

KSB(Kuali Service Bus)

Evolving

KIM(Kuali Identity Management)

Initial Release

Challenges for Rice1. Needs work to integrate with other non-

Kuali Enterprise applications.• Ex: Non-Rice enabled applications cannot

publish services.

2. Investments are necessary• Staffing• Documentation• Component maturity (KIM)

3. Documentation needs attention

Kuali Service Bus (KSB)

• Enables real-time application interaction

• Custom built – Goal of incorporating a mature open source bus (driven by KS)

• Flexible security

• Light weight

• Registry of services

Kuali Nervous System (KNS)• Provides:

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

• a common look and feel through screen drawing framework

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

• a standard way to use workflow, perform CRUD operations, handle business transactions

Kuali Nervous System (KNS)• Data Dictionary

• Provides single location to define fields

• Transactional documents• Data entry that models business process

• Maintenance documents• Basic CRUD operations for support tables

• Inquires• Standard way to drill down into info

• Lookups• Standard search infrastructure

Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW)

• Facilitates routing and approval of business processes

• Provides re-usable routing rule creation

• Provides hooks for client applications to handle workflow lifecycle events

• Provides route log functionality for auditing

Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW)

• eDocLite• Paper Electronic forms

• No Java programming required

• Hosted centrally, deployed at dept level

• Hidden jewel of KEW

Kuali Enterprise Notification (KEN)

• 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

Kuali Enterprise Notification (KEN)

• Provides a secure and controlled environment for notifying the masses

• Eliminates sifting through email

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

• Audit trail just as in KEW

KEN - Institutional Use Case

Faculty member logs into campus portal:

• Notices that their grant proposal was successfully submitted to grants.gov (KRA)

• Notices that their lab equipment purchase cannot be drawn against the account provided (KFS)

• Notices that their merit package has been forwarded on to their dean's office for review (MyInfoVault)

• Notices that two sections of their course are full for current quarter (Sakai)

Kuali Identity Management (KIM)

• 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 products (Grouper, Signet, etc) or other IdMtools

Kuali Identity Management (KIM)

Kuali Identity Management (KIM)

Strategies for Adoption

• Build out central Rice infrastructure in Middleware team

• Integrate KIM interface to Mothra/Sun IdM

• Leverage Rice framework in non-Kuali applications to “glue” administrative systems together

• Promote eDocLite to departmental IT groups

UC Davis’s central Rice support model

What’s Next for Rice?

• Rice components will piggy back on each other• KEW and KEN will use KNS to draw screens, etc.

• Standards• JPA for data persistence (move to Hibernate)

• Easier configuration and turn-key upgrades

• Light weight service interfaces (WSDL, XSD)

• Open source ESB foundation for KSB

Resources

• http://rice.kuali.org• Rice Wiki

• https://test.kuali.org/confluence/x/FmI

• Kuali Rice at UC Davis• Hampton Sublett (hbsublett@ucdavis.edu)• Curtis Bray (clbray@ucdavis.edu)