Wednesday 30 April 2008

jBPM Community Day in Dublin On June 6th

The jBPM Community Day in Dublin is a great opportunity to learn more about jBPM, the Process Virtual Machine or JBoss in general. The core jBPM developers and key members of the community will be there in a relaxed atmosphere. It's just friday afternoon on June 6th. There will be some informative sessions, guinness entertainment and plenty of breaks to network and talk to others in the jBPM community. Lunch and evening meal included and it's free ! What more could you want :-)

Click here for more information about this great event.

You can register by simply sending an email to dublin@jbpm.org with your name in it.

I hope to see you all there.

Process Virtual Machine Alpha2 Released

The Process Virtual Machine is a simple Java library for building and executing state machines. It can optionally store process definitions and executions in a relational database. The Process Virtual Machine serves high level BPM as well as low level Java state machines. It serves as a foundation for several process language implementations like jPDL, BPEL, XPDL and Pageflow.

This second release adds a deployer architecture, enterprise bindings and documentation about the persistence of processes. It further improves the stream handling and the job executor.

Check it out !

The Process Virtual Machine Homepage
Documentation
Download

Enjoy and let us know what you think of it.

JavaPolis Refactored To Javoxx

JavaPolis becomes Javoxx
"
New name
New logo
Same Concept : Giving a voice to the Java community
"
Check it out on the JavaPolis website, On the Javoxx website and at Parleys.com

Mark December 8-12 in your calendars, book your flight and hotel and start packing your bags. This is a mandatory excursion for each self respecting Java developer. This is one of the few situations where I'm happy to fulfil my obligations!

Thursday 24 April 2008

In Depth Analysis Of OSS BPM By Jason Woodruff

Jason was able to extract our grand vision perfectly from the bits and pieces that we've published here and there on the forums, articles and website.

Congrats, Jason.

Tuesday 22 April 2008

jBPM Nominated For JAX Innovation Awards 2008

Cool! jBPM has been nominated for the JAX Innovation Awards 2008. The Award Ceremony will take place in the course of the JAX Conference on Wednesday, 23 April.

This got me worried about what we're going to do with the prize money *if* we happen to win it. It sparked the idea of a jBPM Event. We could spend the money on flying in people from the community over to our event.

We already selected Dublin as the place to be and probably June 6th as the date. Mark that date in your calendar ! Chances are good that it's going to happen anyway. So we feel like we've won already, regardless of the outcome :-) But still we hope that we win some prize money to bring lots of community people, partners and clients to our event to share experiences and have a good Guinness together.

Let's keep our fingers crossed...

Friday 4 April 2008

Awsome jBPM Performance Numbers

Couple of weeks ago I saw a great presentation by Joram Barrez of Dolmen called "The Full Stack". Basically he showed how they selected jBPM and SeeWhy and composed it into a full BPM solution. Since I went to the event with not much expectations, this was a pleasant surprise. Things became even more interesting when Joram showed the performance tests they did to see if jBPM would meet their demands. We wanted to do those tests for ages, but never got to it. So big thanks, Joram for sharing them with us !

As you might know process execution in jBPM can happen with or without persistence. These measurements are done *with* persistence, as this is the most common way of how jBPM is used.

He started with the simplest process. That took 2 milliseconds to execute.
Then a processes that grew longer and longer:

Then he verified the effect of simple and complex process concurrency:


Amen.

So even this complex process runs with only 12 ms overhead of jBPM ! Awsome. Even I was surprised :-)

And the last test was a complete realistic process of handling a hospital report. That took 3 milliseconds to execute.


All of this shows that the overhead created by jBPM runtime process management is really small. Doing the statemanagement of such processes yourself will lead to a lot more development time, and in many cases, the performance will not be as optimized as just using jBPM.

This only highlights the performance evaluation part of the talk. I definitely recommend to read his blog post about the full contents of Joram's presentation.