Kuali Rice 2.0.0-b2-SNAPSHOT Release Notes

Welcome to the first beta release of Kuali Rice version 2.0!

This is the first major release of the Kuali Rice software since version 1.0 which was released in August of 2009. This release brings many new and exciting features and improvements to the Kuali Rice middlware and application development platforms. This document provides early information on the work that has been done as part of 2.0 development and how one can get started working with the software during the beta test phase of the project.

The primary architectural goal for this release of Rice was to position the platform for cross-version service compatibility moving forward. With the increase in the number of applications (both internal and external to Kuali) that are integrating with the Kuali Rice middleware platform, the ability to provide for compatibility across different versions of Kuali Rice has risen to the forefront within the community as a critical need. The end result is intended to be a platform on which institutions can build applications without worrying about major forced upgrade paths for all integrated applications whenever they deploy a new release of Kuali Rice.

Another major effort that was undertaken in support of compatibility work was an effort to improve the modularity of the various components of Kuali Rice. In version 1.0.x of Rice, a high degree of coupling was present in numerous places. Work was done as part of this release to help improve upon that situation.

In addition to the architectural efforts supporting compatibility and modularity, Kuali Rice 2.0 sees the introduction of two new major modules.

The first of these is the Kuali Rapid Application Development (KRAD) module. KRAD is meant to provide the next generation of application development capabilities to those who are building applications based on Kuali software. KRAD provides a platform that can be utilized to build enterprise applications in a way that provides a more rich and flexible user experience than could be provided with the existing Kuali Nervous System (KNS). In fact, KRAD is intended to be the eventual replacement for the KNS which is the platform upon which much of the existing Kuali application software has been written. Note, however, that KNS is not being removed as of Rice 2.0. Work will continue on KRAD past the 2.0 release of Kuali Rice.

The final major piece of functionality that was undertaken for this release was the introduction of the Kuali Rule Management System (KRMS). KRMS is a business rule management system which can be used to author and maintain business rules that can be utilized during decision making processes within an application. This includes the ability to use business rules defined in KRMS to define rules for workflow routing, notification, validation, and other custom scenarios.

More details on each of the major efforts can be found in later sections of this document.