Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The KIE APIs
As of Version 6, both jBPM and Drools (the parent project of jBPM that establishes an in-
ference engine and runtime for both rules and processes) have changed their umbrella name
from Drools/jBPM to KIE.
KIE
stands for
Knowledge Is Everything
; this change was made to encompass all the new
components that keep on getting added to the Drools and jBPM family, such as
OptaPlan-
ner
for planning problems or
Predictive Model Mark-up Language
(
PMML
), an import
functionality. It also uses the KIE name to group generic parts of the unified API, such as
building, deploying, and loading knowledge-related projects.
The main aspect that you should pay attention to is that KIE runtimes work by taking the
knowledge definitions not just from a group of knowledge files like previous versions did.
They instead work by reading their knowledge definitions from the Maven-based JAR files
(Maven:
http://maven.apache.org
) that could contain anything a JAR file could contain,
from classes and configuration files to processes, rules, and much more. This means that
building and loading applications can align with Maven and Maven repositories by adher-
ing to a standardized way of managing code and configuration updates through JAR pub-
lications in specific repositories.
It also includes a declarative configuration in an XML file for KIE projects called
kmod-
ule.xml
; for this configuration, we will create different components to define knowledge
definitions and runtimes, along with the
kbase
and
ksession
tags. It must be located
inside the
META-INF
folder. Here's an example of a
kmodule.xml
file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kmodule xmlns="http://jboss.org/kie/6.0.0/ kmodule">
<kbase name="namedKieBase">
<ksession name="ksession1">
</kbase>
</kmodule>
Before we get to understand this configuration, we need to cover what structures we will
use to actually access the Maven dependencies that define our knowledge runtime. We will
start with a few main concepts, as follows:
• KIE services
• The KIE module
