Trip to Indiana

Here I am, in my room of a nice Marriott hotel, located in a beautiful small town called Bloomington. That's in Indiana, about 50 miles from Indianapolis. We (me and my colleague) are here on the business trip to IU (Indiana University) to meet the technical team behind Kuali Rice project. Our organization is at the phase of evaluating different enterprise workflow and rules engines, and since Rice effort is built by higher education institution(s), it kind of makes sense for us to get involved with, I guess.

Anyway, Kuali is built on Spring, CAS, Acegi (in the future). Our management has "donated" both me and my colleague to join the architecture team for the purpose of helping out with the architecture of Rice, since I am an expert in Spring and my pal is a CAS (http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/) project lead.

So we met the team this afternoon (nice bunch of guys) and they showed us around Kuali and the Kuali Rice. I can't say that I'm impressed so far (heavy, heavy use of XML, XSLT, which I'm not a big fan of; use of Apache OJB for the persistence layer, etc.), but I could say that only time will tell as we dig deeper into it. May be we will be able to convince them to re-evaluate some of the technology choices i.e. use of JPA for the persistence and Mule for the KSB (Kuali Service Bus), and may be I'd be able to sneak in some Groovy in there to define a nice DSL for the Workflow and Business Rules definitions ;-) But until I could fully understand the architecture, I'm not going to speculate anymore.

Hopefully everything goes fine this week, so on Friday I could safely return to my beautiful, young wife and my adorable daughter, whom I already miss!

Later...