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Components

The components that make up Apache KIE predate the umbrella by many years. Each one stands on its own, and they are designed to work together.

Drools​

The rule engine at the core of KIE. Started in 2001 as an open source rule engine and grew into a full business rule management system, today covering DRL rules and the DMN decision standard.

OptaPlanner​

A constraint solver for planning problems — scheduling, routing, rostering and the like. It began in 2006 as Drools Planner before becoming a project in its own right.

jBPM​

A workflow engine for long-running business processes, covering BPMN 2.0, case management and human tasks. From jBPM 5 onwards it was rebuilt around the same knowledge core as Drools.

Kogito​

The cloud-native generation of the engines, announced in 2019. It builds on Quarkus and code generation to run rules, decisions and processes as microservices.

SonataFlow​

A workflow engine for building serverless applications, implementing the CNCF Serverless Workflow specification — SonataFlow worked with version 0.8. It grew out of Kogito.

Tools​

The editors, extensions and developer tooling used to author and run KIE assets.

Along the way​

Beyond the engines, the KIE community incubated a number of initiatives over the years, some of which grew into projects of their own:

  • Dashbuilder, for authoring dashboards and visualizing business data, today part of KIE Tools.
  • TrustyAI, for explainability and auditing of AI-augmented decision services, which continues as an independent open source project.