JBossWorld Recap

JBossWorld was last week in Orlando, FL. Of course, we took the opportunity to meet up in advance with the core JBoss developers. It still surprises me each time how the communication at such meetings can be intense, distributed, apparently anarchistic and yet extremely effective ...often even at 1am at the bar.

My presentation "A Lightweight Approach to Business Processes with JBoss jBPM" was in the very first slot. I always like that very much as jet lag and parties tend to undermine my concentration as the week progresses.

Met up with my good friends at SeeWhy. They might be able to contribute an initial version of the log/event generation in the Process Virtual Machine. The open source collaboration model in practice. Cool.

Same open source spirit for NexusBPM. Matthew Sandoz has already extended jPDL with new node types in the engine and in the graphical designer. Good to see that a long term vision becomes reality. We're happy that Matthew is interested to donate his contributions to the jBPM community and we will be assisting him in the process of doing so.

By coincidence, IDS Scheer's ProcessWorld conference was also taking place at the exact same location at the exact same time. I saw Sandy Kemsley blogging about it and pinged her to have a meeting. We definitely agreed that translating analysis models into executable software artifacts is not as easy as most BPMS vendors make us believe. For many other observations of the BPM market we thought very similar, which is surprising given our different background. Only when it came down to roundtripping between the analysis model and the implementation models of business processes, I seriously doubted if that was achievable, while Sandy had good faith that the big BPM players some day will find a way to make that transparant.

Another interesting meeting was with our new CEO, Jim Whitehurst. Everyone was enthousiast about the fact that he managed to analyse and express exactly where the problems are located in such a short period. Now our expectations him to get them fixed are very high :-)

A last anecdote that I would like to share is my jogging experience around the Marriott World Center. It turned out to be extremely difficult to find a track for jogging. Even the driveway to the hotel was a 4 lane street without cycle or pedestrian facilities. Eventually I saw a golf court behind a small pond and grass. There was a sign before the pond. I assumed it was going to be "Don't walk on the grass" and given my struggles so far, I was completely prepared to ignore it. But the sign didn't say anything like that. Instead it had a much more effective message: "Don't feed the alligators!". It worked for me :-)