jBPM 4.3 Includes BPMN 2.0

Happy newyear! 2010 is going to be the year that BPMN 2.0 will get red hot and make its breakthrough. The BPMN 2.0 specification will be finalized this year and we target for our implementation to be ready around summer time.

We just released jBPM 4.3. This release includes the first part of our BPMN 2.0 language implementation. Check out the online docs http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v4/devguide/html_single/#bpmn2


More details about BPMN on Joram's blog.

Highlights for the jBPM 4.3 release:

• Added BPMN 2.0 runtime engine!
• Extended java activity with ejb method invocation
• Added jms activity (including test facilities)
  
• Added integrated rules deployment and activities rules and rules-decision
  
• Added enhanced spring integration and created continuous integration for it
• Automatic saving of updated deserialized variables
• Added count() capabilities to all queries in the api
• Fixes various bugs

Download jBPM from sourceforge now.

How To Send XA JMS Message On JBoss

It turns out that there is very little information about how to sending JMS messages as part of a JTA transaction using JMS API. Most examples on the web use false for parameter transacted in QueueConnection.createQueueSession(boolean transacted, int acknowledgeMode); in which case the message is sent directly and not at the commit of the JTA transaction.

So I was happy when I found Odi's article: JMS transactions with JTA in JBoss 4.

And from a quick look, there seems to be a lot of interesting developer content on Odi's site. Definitely worth a look.

At first sight, you might think that I'm just sharing this with the world to make it a better place. But actually I'm just adding this 1 link to google's pagerank so that I'll find it quicker next time I need it ;-)

Top 10 Devoxx Talks On Parleys

Amazing! Just a week after Devoxx, the talks were already available online. So if you were not able to come in person to Devoxx (only allowed with a doctors note:-), or if like me, you have spend all your time talking to people instead of attending the sessions then you can see still attend all the talks now on Parleys beta for only 49 EUR. If you ask me that is peanuts for a lot of great content that is still up to date.

For the moment the most viewed Devoxx'09 talks are:

1. Craftsmanship and Policy - Robert C. Martin
2. The JavaPosse Live (First free talk)
   
3. JDK7 Update and Java SE 7 - Mark Reinhold
4. Enterprising JavaFX - Richard Bair & Jasper Potts
5. Turning labors of love into day jobs - James Gosling
6. Project Lombok - Roel Spilker & Reinier Zwitserloot
7. Project Coin - Joseph D. Darcy
8. jBPM4 in Action - Tom Baeyens & Joram Barrez
9. Do we really know how to develop software?- Ivar Jacobson
10. The Cambrian Cloud Computing Explosion - John M Willis

We're in it! <handle-pull-back-gesture>Yes!</handle-pull-back-gesture>

Spring Enterprise Recipes Explains jBPM4's Spring Integration

It seems to be the jBPM book season :-) The new jBPM-Spring integration of jBPM 4 is explained in a new book called Spring Enterpriese Recipes. It's written by Gary Mak of the best-selling Spring Recipes and Josh Long, an expert Spring user and developer, Spring Enterprise Recipes is one of the first books on the new Spring 3.


Wow, that's some quick publishing! Just in time so that you can give these jBPM books as a xmas present to your wife, husband or partner ;-)

New Book: jBPM Developer Guide By Salaboy

Salaboy just finished his new jBPM Developer Guide.


So fresh the ink is still wet. But no worries, there's also an eBook version of it.

Kudo's, Salaboy! Nice work.

Ronald Enters Hall Of Fame

Ronald finally gets due credits for his long term commitment and contributions to jBPM. Here's a ranking of top posters in all of JBoss community. To me, this is the real hall of fame. Respect!

He's now in an awsome 3rd place only behind Adrian "MC" Brock and Scott "SX" Stark. Adrian and Scott are both one of the first JBoss employees and they basically wrote (and still write) JBoss. So being in that company as an external contributor is a major achievement.

And we're even more proud since you've accomplished this with mostly jBPM discussions.

Congrats, Ronald. Again, respect.

The First OSS BPMN 2 Process Engine

Next month, jBPM will be the first open source process engine that natively runs BPMN 2 executable processes. BPMN 2 will be released as part of jBPM 4.3 next month (January 1st) Awsome ! And we got a lot more tricks lined up. Next months are going to be interesting.

A special thanks to our honoured community members Bernd Ruecker and Ronald van Kuijk for kicking off our BPMN implementation back in July. Congrats, Guys! Well done.

Joram Barrez already shows a complete preview with BPMN 2. Check it out !

Joram also created a wiki page full of usefull information on our BPMN language, including a description on how we position it against our jPDL language.

jBPM At SNS Bank Wins Global Award for Excellence in BPM & Workflow

"SNS Bank Reduced Costs and Increased Performance with JBoss jBPM", with that paper, Eric Schabell won a silver Global Award for Excellence in BPM & Workflow

Congratulations, Eric!

jBPM Reaches 1.000.000 Downloads

...

'nough said.

Devoxx Starts Strong, Lot Of Attention For jBPM

That's the interpreted translation of this article on ZDNet. Indeed Devoxx is a great place to be. For sure if you know that the JBoss booth is at the center and it has a beer tap and a soccer table :-)

And that attention will continue this afternoon. Our talk this afternoon is at 15:10. If you're at Devoxx (and you should!) then I hope to see you there. We even have a couple of limited-edition-jbpm-t-shirts to give away.

Planning Your Devoxx Schedule?

Don't forget to include these jBPM talks:

jBPM in Action
University Talk
Monday November 16th, 9am - 12am
Me and Joram Barrez will start with simple examples and then goes deeper technical. You'll get the full works and learn how to unleash all the power of jBPM.

Meet the jBPM Team
BOF
Monday November 16th, 7pm - 8pm
More informal get together with the core developers of jBPM. We'll have some materials ready, but we hope that we can drive this session based on questions from you!

jBPM in Action
Conference Session
Wednesday November 18th, 3:10pm - 4:10pm
We'll show where, how and when jBPM fits into your project and include some awsome demo's.

And don't forget to check out the JavaNews magazine that is distributed!

Hope to see you there!

jBPM 4.2 Adds A Lot Of Production Goodies

jBPM 4.2 makes it a lot easier to maintain a jBPM installation in production.

We've added automatic upgrades of the DB from previous 4.x versions. There is a script that you can run that automatically upgrades your jBPM DB to the new version. This includes schema updates and data updates. A version check is included that compares the jBPM library version with the jBPM DB schema version. Implementing all this was not the hard part. The hard part was setting up the QA so that every possible upgrade is tested on every possible DB. Phew! That was quite a challenge and I'm very happy we took it on and finished successfully.

We also added process instance migration. When deploying a new version of a process, you can now specify that all the old process instances have to be migrated to the new process version. This jira issue was a serious old-timer (JBPM-165!). Glad we have have it finally covered.

Also we've split up the internal parser. In jBPM 4, process files are stored in xml format in the jBPM repository. In case we would introduce jPDL changes, then old processes that are deployed in a jBPM 4 repository must still work OK in future versions. That strategy is now in place.

Then we refactored classloading to work exactly as in jBPM 3. That means that jBPM will 'see' classes and resources

• from inside your .war or .ear files
• from inside your business archives (.bar files). .bar file is the archive file in which you can put your jPDL processes, class files, forms and other resources and deploy them to the jBPM DB.
• from the server classpath

Furthermore we simplified the way how jBPM was deployed on JBoss so that it is now more portable to other appservers.

Next is a portable id generator. In jBPM 4.0 and 4.1 on MySQL, when you deleted process instances and then rebooted the MySQL DB, the id generation could break down. We've now installed a portable, clusterable id generation mechanism that works the same on all DBs.

The full JIRA release notes.

Summary:

• Added business archive (.bar) classloading [JBPM-2200]
• Simplified jboss jbpm service archive architecture [JBPM-2501]
• Automated database upgrade tool [JBPM-2509]
• Portable, clusterable id generation [JBPM-2526]
• Parser backwards compatibility [JBPM-2565]
• Enabled programmatic user defined transactions in JTA environments [JBPM-2524]
• Added In Incubation: Process instance versioning [JBPM-165]
• Added In Incubation: Process customization to developer api for debugging and simulation [JBPM-2578]
• A bunch of bug fixes

Download it now!

Or just browse the documentation online.

Jopr plugin for jBPM

Jopr is a management console for JBoss projects and other applications. It has a plugin architecture. Jim Ma now wrote a Jopr plugin for JBoss. Jim's blog post about the jBPM plugin includes screenshots and a simple step by step explanation, he also captured this video:

jopr jbpm plugin from JimMa on Vimeo.

Great work, Jim !

Great Free BPMN Training Slides

Thanks to Ronald van Kuijk, I found Jim Arlow's presentation about BPMN.

Introduction To BPMN

View more presentations from jimarlow.

125 readable slides that give good overview and even some deeper insights into BPMN.

JBossWorld Slides

I've posted the slides from my talk at JBossWorld.

Keep an eye on Joram Barrez' blog as he'll publish the very nice demo movies soon.