The Kuali Rice effort provides an enterprise class middleware suite of integrated products that allows both Kuali and non-Kuali applications to be built in an agile fashion, such that developers are able to react to end-user business requirements in an efficient and productive manner, so that they can produce high quality business applications.
Rice is built with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts in mind. Specifically, end developers are able to build robust systems with common enterprise workflow functionality, customizable and configurable user interfaces with a clean and universal look and feel, and general notification features to allow for a consolidated list of work "action items". All of this adds up to a re-usable development framework that encourages a simplified approach to developing true business functionality as modular applications.
Documentation is available for each release.