KIE — short for Knowledge Is Everything — is a community of solutions and supporting tooling for knowledge engineering and process automation, focusing on events, rules, and workflows. The name has a history going back more than two decades.
The projects that make up Apache KIE predate the umbrella by many years. Drools began in 2001 as an open source rule engine and grew into a full business rule management system at JBoss, later Red Hat. OptaPlanner started in 2006 as Drools Planner before becoming a project in its own right. jBPM emerged at JBoss as a workflow engine for long-running business processes, and from jBPM 5 (2010) onwards it was rebuilt around the same knowledge core as Drools. The KIE umbrella name was introduced alongside Drools and jBPM 6 to bring the projects — engines, tooling, and shared infrastructure — under one roof.
The community projects also served as the upstream for a line of commercial offerings by Red Hat: JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5, Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6, and Red Hat Process Automation Manager and Red Hat Decision Manager 7.
The Drools and jBPM 6 and 7 generations came with distinct components of their own. Guvnor provided the web-based repository and authoring environment for business rules and knowledge assets. It evolved into the KIE Workbench, later rebranded as Business Central — a full web environment for authoring, building, and managing rules, processes, forms, and dashboards. KIE Server was the standalone execution server of that generation, exposing REST APIs to run rules, processes, and plannings deployed as kjars. These components were superseded by the cloud-native generation, with authoring moving to KIE Tools and execution to Kogito.
For most of their history the projects were developed in the open on GitHub under the kiegroup organization, sponsored by Red Hat. In 2019, Kogito was announced — a continuation of Drools, jBPM, and OptaPlanner, completely redesigned to be cloud-native — building on Quarkus and code generation to run rules, decisions, and processes as microservices.
Beyond the engines, the KIE community incubated a number of initiatives over the years, some of which grew into projects of their own:
- Dashbuilder — a tool for authoring dashboards and visualizing business data, today part of KIE Tools.
- TrustyAI — explainability
and auditing for AI-augmented decision services; it continues today as an
independent open source project. Traces of it remain in this repository
(e.g. the
kogito-trustyandkogito-explainabilitymodules). - SonataFlow — a workflow engine for building serverless applications, implementing the CNCF Serverless Workflow specification, grown out of Kogito.
In July 2022, Red Hat and IBM announced that IBM was joining the KIE community, combining IBM's leadership in business automation with Red Hat's leadership in open source, and shared their intent to move the technologies to a foundation to widen the network of collaborators (see the announcement).
On January 13th, 2023, KIE entered the
Apache Incubator. The
repositories moved from github.com/kiegroup to github.com/apache under
the incubator-kie-* prefix, the community adopted the Apache Way, and the
project's home became kie.apache.org.
The kiegroup organization forked back some repositories from Apache KIE as midstreams in order for Red Hat to keep maintaining its commercial offerings based on KIE.