Friday 29 January 2010

BPMN Modelling To Executable Unit Testing In 12 Minute Screencast

Joram Barrez created a short but interesting screencast. He starts with a process model created by Signavio BPMN process modeller. Then this process is imported in an eclipse project and a full unit test is worked out. Congrats, Joram! Very clear explanation.

Other recent presentation materials on jBPM:

Friday 22 January 2010

Learning jBPM Is Good For Your Salary

It's shown by these SimplyHired stats.
So don't waiste your time today and start here: http://jbpm.org

Tuesday 19 January 2010

Camunda Publishes Insightful BPMN PraxisHandbuch

PraxisHandbuch BPMN is a must read for all people that understand German. We've worked quite a lot with Bernd Ruecker and the other folks at Camunda. And it's always a pleasure.
At Camunda, they have a lot of experience on how to bring BPM into practice. There is a lot more to it then just using a BPM product. This book provides simple guidelines so that any company can benefit from the real power of BPM.

The rest of the world can only hope that it gets translated soon :-)

Friday 15 January 2010

Blending Processes And Rules With jBPM

This integration with rules and processes is a first important step to facilitate all aspects of Business Process Management (BPM) into jBPM. From a runtime engine perspective, we'll be expanding further in this direction to cover all artefact types that are involved automating business processes to for example services. On the other hand, we'll also be expanding towards linking these BPM related artefacts to the business users. More on that topic soon.

The rules deployer is a convenience integration between jBPM and Drools. It allows for unified deployment of processes, rules together with forms and other process resources in a .bar business archive. jBPM creates a KnowledgeBase based on all .drl files that are included in a business archive deployment. Activities like the rules and rules-decision leverage this KnowledgeBase.

A rules-decision will take a single outgoing transition based on the evaluation of rules. Let's first look at a rules-decision example process:

This is the RulesDecision jPDL process file (click to enlarge) :
Now all you have to do is deploy the following .drl file together with the process in a .bar business archive and deploy it to jBPM (click to enlarge)
For your convenience, the process variables are made available as global variables in the rules. Then you can start a new process instance with jBPM like this (click to enlarge):
And your rules will be used to evaluate which outgoing transition will be taken in the process execution. Voila. That's all there is to it.

Similarly, a rules activity will evaluate rules, allowing them to update process variables or perform other actions. Let's look at a rules example process:
The Rules jPDL process file looks like this (click to enlarge):
Imagine a process variable of type Room (click to enlarge)
And a rule like this (click to enlarge)
Then starting a new process instance like this (click to enlarge):
will execute the activity, evaluate the rule and update the room process variable.

jBPM Hot Stuff

jBPM mugs, t-shirts, magnets and pins.
You don't want to miss this jBPM hot stuff. I already placed my order :-)

Wednesday 6 January 2010

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:
Download jBPM from sourceforge now.