Process Developments

Activiti 5.8 Adds Asynchronous Continuations

2011-10-20T14:01:00.002+02:00

Activiti is the Apache licensed BPMN process engine. We've just released version 5.8 which has following highlights:

Asynchronous continations (tech preview)
Added BPMN inclusive gateway
Improved Spring support
CDI integration improvements
Bug fixes

Get an opinion of your own! Go download and try it out.

BPM In The Cloud

2011-10-10T10:06:00.008+02:00

Recently the Activiti team started exploring which parts of BPM could be brought to the cloud effectively. The first thing we realized is that on the cloud, a requirement is self-service by professional consumers. This means that end users should be able to manage the apps they use. Up to now, BPM systems were managed by in-house IT departments.

Immediately it became clear that hosting traditional BPM engine on the cloud is a big technical challenge with a relative low value for professional consumers. We have to look for new ways to deliver BPM on the cloud.

BPM is about combining automatic steps with human task forms. Building task forms on the cloud is a valid concept. Look for example at Formstack. Combining such task forms in a process is a great idea I think. But the generic automatic steps in BPM processes are more problematic on the cloud.

What are those automatic steps that people want to do on the cloud? Well there is plenty of choice. Read data from a google spreadsheet, or salesforce account, then build a document that is uploaded to google docs or dropbox. It could be doable to let professional consumers build process descriptions in a web browser.

But what is often overlooked is that the data used in processes is too complex for end users. For example, from a human perspective, the data read from the spreadsheet is the same as the data that has to be put in a PDF in some subsequent step in the process. But the building blocks that are used to compose workflow processes have to rely on concrete technical datatypes. There is almost always data conversion and projection necessary between those steps in a process. Specifying technical data type-conversions in a workflow is too complex for professional consumers.

We have to make it simpler.

On the other hand, the trend to Advanced Case Management (ACM) really fits well into the cloud. Dynamic management of tasks without a predefined flow matches perfect with the professional consumer needs and capabilities. The ability to associate documents and other forms of content makes it a great match. An extra dimension is added by the fact that a cloud solution for ACM enables seamless B2B collaboration.

This already gives an initial insight in the direction that the Activiti team is currently looking forward towards bringing BPM to the cloud.

Energy Distributors In Germany Using Activiti

2011-10-07T14:36:00.002+02:00

On October first, Next Level Integration upgraded their product which now includes Activiti for dealing with the business process. Already 50 German energy distribution companies are now using this in production.

This presentation (in German) introduces their product and shows how they leverage Activiti processes: Prozesse im Messwesen (pdf) This is another great example of how Activiti is embedded into a product for a vertical market making it a lot more flexible and powerful.

Alfresco Activiti 5.7 Revamps Explorer

2011-08-16T15:42:00.003+02:00

We're released Activiti 5.7 today, the embeddable workflow and BPM engine. This release includes a revamped Activiti Explorer. The new app merges the task management functionality of the previous Activiti Explorer with the admin functionality in Activiti Probe.

We're proud on this result. A celebration is in place here: Kudo's to all contributors! And special thanks to the Vaadin team for supporting us with the new Explorer.

Download it from the Activiti website.

And participate in the forums.

Recycling BPM

2011-07-26T12:55:00.005+02:00

Peter Evans-Greenwood has written a post called BPM over promised and under delivered that is a clear description of a historic shift in the BPM space.

Peter refers to Taylor to indicate we've been looking at automation and BPM in basically an old school way.

The [Taylor] idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality.

The early software applications and later BPM has been centered around that approach.

Departmental applications were first deployed to automate small repudiative tasks, such as tracking stock levels or calculating payrolls. Then we looked at the interactions between these tasks, giving birth to enterprise software in the process. Business Process Management (BPM) is the pinnacle of our efforts...

The Taylor historic context is great to get the picture. In the past, there were just a few people had the knowledge to break down goals into tasks for workers. Workers were little informed and just had to do as they were told. BPM systems took the same approach. BPM systems orchestrate and dump workers just have to perform small, simple, repetitive tasks.

That is indeed an aspect of BPM that I've always found problematic. In practice, it turns out to be very hard to find business processes in which the orchestration part can be totally automated. Human judgement is very hard to capture in predefined paths in a process flow.

With previously jBPM and now Activiti, we always took a very pragmatic approach. Over time it has become clear that embeddable BPM is a sweet spot. Enriching applications with the capability to combine human task forms with automatic steps has turned out to be a very valid proposition. Only in big banks we've seen usage that comes close to the traditional orchestration automation promise of BPM.

I also agree with Peter that

There has been some half steps in the right direction, with the emergence of Adaptive Case Management (ACM)

I think this trend is becoming clear by now, but it's Peter's post that made me think of an important potential reason for this: The democratization of information. Where in the past (read more then 10 years ago) only managers are informed and needed to break goals into tasks, now a lot more information has become freely accessible in organisations so that average workers become better informed and can make better decisions.

Also I've seen in most practical situations that processes grow organically. When people get asked a similar task multiple times, they tend to organise themselves better for dealing with these repetitive tasks. That way a business process grows bottom-up. There is not always a central, complete view of the process. It's often a very big challenge to establishing this central view of a business process. It usually takes a lot of interviews and conflict resolution to get to that central view. And you know what... this bottoms-up approach actually works well in most cases. Most often the optimizations that can be found in the central view of a process do not outweigh the effort to build the centralized process view.

In conclusion I think the top down aspect that aims at top down business process modeling the orchestration is ready for the scrapyard. Let's get rid of the BPM promise that business agility can be obtained by purchasing a BPM system. And let's recycle those bits and enhance case management with that expertise. By default people should be able to collaborate in an ad-hoc fashion. And when people spot repetitive patterns, everyone should be able to create their own small process flows for simplifying their own work. That form of process automation as an add-on to case management matches a lot better with the common needs of todays web and knowledge workers.

Alfresco's Activiti 5.6 Improves Mule and Camel Support

2011-06-01T12:18:00.005+02:00

Highlights for the 5.6 release:

Added direct Mule and Camel integration
Easier way to retrieve businessKey from task listeners
Improved support for Alfresco processes
Added support for delegateExpressions in tasklistener
Added support for BPMN multi instance in the eclipse designer
Extended length of all user defined text columns to 4000
See the full release notes

Get Activiti 5.6 now before it gets you!

Alfresco's Activiti 5.5 Released

2011-05-02T10:01:00.005+02:00

Activiti is a superdelux BPMN 2.0 based process engine. 5.5 is again packed with a lot of new goodies:

Added CDI support (Congrats to Camunda for this contribution!)
Added dynamic sub task capabilities
Added support for event/activity streams
Tiese Barrell added support for default value for CustomServiceTask fields in the eclipse process designer
Simplified persistence
Performance improvements
Bug fixes

Download Activiti 5.5 and find out how much more you can do with BPM power.

Mobile, Web Client Storage And Offline

2011-04-30T10:00:00.005+02:00

Desktops and laptops will be mostly connected to the internet. So almost all software written today targeted for desktops and laptops is web based. For mobile apps, that is much more tricky. Mobile devices are used when people are on the move. While general connectivity coverage is increasing, it will still take quite a couple of years before all planes, trains and stations give you decent broadband required by today's apps.

For mobile apps it's a tough choice between HTML 5 and native apps. Native apps don't require to be connected, but you need to develop one for every platform (at least Android and iOS).

Martin Fowler's blog CrossPlatformMobile makes the valid point that cross platform toolkits are no attractive alternative. But then there is this section that really confuses me

The biggest issue here is offline use. If you can live with online all the time, then this won't be a problem, but you need offline you'll need to explore the various local storage options.

This seems to suggest that the local storage options to some extend would be able to reduce the need for connectivity. That would decide the mobile platform battle in favour of HTML 5 easily. But I still don't see how storage on the client side helps to remove the need for connectivity. If you load a webapp before you go offline, then it is possible to keep it running on local storage when connectivity is down. That is a nice extension to webapps.

But afaict it doesn't give the ability to work offline because loading the app still requires connectivity and a refresh gives a 404 page not found without the possibility to get the app back in the browser. Also the linked article doesn't really provide a solution for this.

Given that the respected Martin Fowler seems to indicate that web storage has to be looked at as a solution for offline usage of webapps, I assume I must be missing something. But what ?

I'm in general puzzled why browsers are so bad at using caches when working offline. Yet it seems like a solvable solution for browsers to use their cache to overcome these 2 obstacles of loading the app and refresh and make HTML 5 the ultimate mobile platform.

Do you see a solution so that HTML 5 becomes a valid mobile technology option that also covers offline usage?

Tijs Rademakers Joins Activiti

2011-04-05T14:35:00.003+02:00

Tijs Rademakers joins Alfresco to supercharge Activiti. We are very proud to attract a top talented engineer like Tijs! Tijs brings a rich experience from consulting on various BPM related projects. Tijs is co-authoring his second Manning book. The first was Open Source ESB's in Action and he's is now working hard to complete Activiti in Action.
Tijs will continue to lead the Activiti Designer, an Eclipse plugin for authoring BPMN 2.0 processes. He will also be involved in architecting and building out the process capabilities to make Activiti the #1 platform for case and process management on the cloud.

Welcome to the team, Tijs. Looking forward to working with you!

Activiti 5.4 Released

2011-04-01T11:11:00.004+02:00

Here's the next Activiti shipment

Added first version of BPM-roundtrip with Activiti Cycle (see this Screencast)
Started building case management features in the engine: Added dynamic comments, attachments and due dates to tasks in Activiti Engine
IMAP folder scanning for new tasks
Added accounts to users in Activiti Engine
Provided support to specify form properties in Activiti Designer Eclipse plugin
Many bug fixes

Download Activiti 5.4 here

Discuss on the forums

Activiti Switches To BPEL

2011-04-01T09:11:00.005+02:00

[Update to avoid confusion: please check the date on which this article was posted]

Today we are announcing a drastic change in the project that we've been working on for quite a while: Starting from the 5.4 release later today, Activiti will upgrade the file format of all processes from BPMN 2.0 to BPEL.

Rather then considering business processes as a combination of manual and automatic steps, we came to the conclusion that XML, WSDL and XPath is the way of the future and a much more natural fit for large corporations. The things you can do in XPath are simply amazing.

We are proud to ship with this release with full automatic and seamless conversion of existing processes. Just replace the jar files and reboot your app. What's more, our eclipse plugin will automatically refactor your Java beans and add WS-I compliant web services adapters. But we recommend take a back up of your project before activating that refactoring.

With the conversion to BPEL fully completed, we now will start working on the mobile client. To improve usability by business people and at the same time simplify the implementation of our forms component, we'll build a mobile tree browser for XML documents. It will be available next month for iOS and Android. It's a really cool app that allows you to compose SOAP requests in a structured tree view. Those requests can then be sent directly into the new BPEL based Activiti engine. Also the app will allow you to browse your task list XML messages in a graphical tree with collapse and expand features.

We've upgraded our Amazon account to handle all the download traffic that we expect later today. But in case Amazon's download servers would not be able to handle the load, please keep trying and let us know.

Unveiling Next Steps Of Alfresco's Activiti Future

2011-03-16T14:12:00.014+01:00

There's a very interesting discussion going on at ebizQ: Will case management soon take over BPM? Instead of trying to position all the overloaded acronyms, I'm going to give a concrete picture of where Activiti is now and where we are heading.

Activiti now is a native BPMN process engine with nice web based and other tooling around it. We have a strong adoption already in the developer communities. This has pushed us to support very complex processes with a lot of features for easily including automated steps into the process. We also include strong capabilities to include manual steps into an automated process. Things like specifying a BPMN userTask and associating a form to it. People assigned to the task can then complete tasks by submitting a form.

The limitation with workflows and BPM processes is that they are fixed. That's good for complex processes that are well understood and have a high frequency. Typical examples are handling insurance claims and expense notes. Of course, not all work done in organizations is of this nature.

Even in organizations that manage their business processes well, a lot of work is done ad-hoc. For instance, imagine that you have to organize a 1 year anniversary party for a project that you started almost a year ago (any resemblance to Activiti upcoming 1st anniversary is pure coincidence ;-) Most likely there will be no predefined process for organizing such a party.

It will take someone to analyze this particular problem and to break this complex task in subtasks that can be delegated and combined to achieve the desired results. So a first aspect is that people will get involved. Sub tasks might be created. People will discuss these tasks and refer to existing content like websites, content stored in Alfresco or Google docs. While the organization of the party is in progress, new ideas kick in, making some tasks in the strategy obsolete and other new tasks have to be performed.

People today will tackle this with a bunch of email traffic. And lots of time is spent on writing customized emails to bring different people up to speed. For each new person that gets involved in the party task, it takes a lot of time writing emails for the party organizer to share the bigger context of the request.

The first step that we're adding now to Activiti is a snappy environment in which that kind of collaboration is supported. Apart from the tasks that are created by process instances, you'll be able to create tasks dynamically on the fly. It will be possible to involve people with these tasks, have discussions and associate any kind of content like plain URL's, Alfresco docs, Google docs etc to the task (aka case). Furthermore, it will be possible to create sub tasks dynamically. Here's one of our early mockups:

While building this environment, we include as a criterium that it may not be harder to work with this tool then to write an email.

Imagine that people can be involved in tasks and they automatically get the full background of a particular request they receive. That will drastically reduce email and make the group far more effective.

In a couple of years, the organizer of the anniversaries might start to think: "I've done this before a couple of times. It might be worth documenting or automating the process of organizing anniversary parties". That's when the organizer will be able to open the last party task and start building a process based on the subtasks that were created. We envision a very simple process editor to orchestrate those process steps. Activiti KickStart shows the direction we're thinking in.

At that point it might start to get interesting to include automatic steps. Activiti focusses on simplifying the component model for plugging in new automatic steps in the graphical process authoring tools and in the runtime engine. Extending Activiti Designer shows the direction. This means that in big organizations that have an IT department, the developers can create create custom serviceTask types that can then be used as automatic steps in these processes by non technical people.

In some cases, this might grow to become pretty complex processes. At that point, Activiti KickStart modeling might be too limited as that is targeted at non technical people. Because Activiti is based on BPMN 2.0, it will be possible to move these organically grown processes into full BPMN 2.0 based modeling tools.

This shows how Activiti's strategy to support the organic nature in which business processes are conceived. It reduces email traffic and overhead for ad-hoc work and provides an environment in which managing business processes becomes so easy that you don't really have to think about it.

We plan to have a first version of dynamic case management in our 5.5 release, which is planned for the 1st of May. Then by September we aim to have the full vision of dynamic case management organically rolling into automated business processes completed.

Now imagine all of this would be free, distributed under a very liberal license like Apache and closely integrated into Alfresco's enterprise content management. Wouldn't that be great?!

I think we're heading for some very exciting times at Activiti ;-)

Activiti 5.3 Adds Multi Instance And Rules Integration

2011-03-01T08:36:00.003+01:00

Activiti 5.3 was released today and adds following highlights:

Added BPMN multi instance (==foreach) support
Added BPMN intermediate timer catch event
Added business rule task with Drools integration
Improved Spring integrations: added possibility to limit visibility of beans and also exposed spring beans in scripts
Added administrator console to manage users and groups
Added automatic DB type discovery
Various bug fixes

Download Activiti 5.3

Browse the online documentation

Ask questions and discuss on the forum

Why IT Should Select A BPMS Instead Of Business

2011-02-03T08:43:00.009+01:00

Farshid Ketabchi's Introductory note on BPM is very remarkable. It starts with a good overview of the Business Process Management (BPM) benefits, the market and the vendor landscape very well. The piece that stands out of the crowd is the clear distinction he makes between "BPM as a business management discipline" and "BPM technology".

I believe that distinction is crucial and not yet properly understood. Traditional BPM vendors have everything to gain by keeping that separation blurry. In this post, I'll show that this separation is vital for understanding that IT people should drive the selection of BPM Systems, not business people.

The distinction between BPM as a management discipline and BPM Systems (BPMS) is an observation rarely pointed out by BPM vendors and therefor worth while highlighting. BPM vendors too often try to blur the distinction between the software product they offer and BPM as a business management discipline. Next they talk at length about the benefits of that combination to show that their software product brings all these benefits as a package that you can just buy off the shelf.

It's basically any manager's job to make an organization run more efficient. So basically any manager is managing business processes. BPM vendors are happy to offer this skill in a box. But that is a false promise. BPM software cannot replace the management skills necessary to manage business processes. Which are the important business processes in this organization? What are the steps that we should automate and what should be done by people? Which people should get involved when? What is essential for this organization and what is detail? It requires a manager with vision and analytical skills to perform the business process management discipline well.

A BPM software solution cannot replace that vision and analytical skills to optimize the performance of an organization. That remains the key responsibility of the business people. BPM software can never claim to take over that innovation and change management aspect.

But a BPM System can help in 2 key areas:

Produce software to support business processes
Facilitate collaboration

Business people should control and drive the optimization of business processes. BPM systems too often try to put non technical business people also in control of the software automation. That is I believe a common pitfall for BPM systems. Instead, IT should have a BPM System at their disposal to help them automate software support for those business processes faster.

Non technical business people should not focus on producing software. Instead they typically focus on requirements documents and process analysis diagrams. And the collaboration aspect of BPM Systems should allow for discussions between business and IT people about all the artifacts that matter in the collaboration. Generic social features around the artifacts that matter to both the business people and IT people is what the BPM System should offer for the collaboration aspect. That's not rocket science. It does not take special management skills to evaluate collaboration features.

The point here is that BPM Systems have a pure software development aspect and a social collaboration aspect. The pure software development aspects can only be properly evaluated by IT people. And while the social collaboration aspect matters to both the business and IT people, it doesn't take special management skills to evaluate those collaboration features. Hence the conclusion is that IT departments should drive the selection of BPM Systems, not the business managers.

Activiti 5.2 Released

2011-02-01T10:10:00.007+01:00

Activiti 5.2, the rock solid BPM platform, was just released. This release adds following highlights:

First sneak preview version of the jBPM-Activiti migration
Visualization of the current activity in Activiti Probe
Added support for BPMN error event in Activiti Engine
Added support for BPMN 2.0 import in Activiti Designer
Improved form datatypes
Automated in container testing
Various bug fixes

Special thanks goes to Maciej Prochniak for contributing the visualization of the current activity in Activiti Probe.

Also I wish to thank Christian Muelder for being available on a saturday to fix our hudson coninuous integration box hosted by Next Level Integration.

Camunda has received excellent feedback on their Activiti training. We recommend it!

And the special recognition in the order of Activiti for patience and perseverance goes to Tiese Barell on this 284 post forum thread! ;-)

Download Activiti 5.2

User guide documentation including 10 minute tutorial

Javadocs

Coding While Asleep Can Be A Good Thing

2011-01-12T08:51:00.003+01:00

With high hopes I started reading Sleepcoding's Activiti ‘Hello world’ on play!. Almost through the post and no mention of his impressions about Activiti. But then, at the end, my patience was finally rewarded:

I said all i can about play’s plugin system in the previous post, it is great. But since it was about initializing activiti i didn’t say anything about it. AFAICT, it is one of the few libraries/frameworks that delivers what it advertises. It is light-weight, fast and simple. They say a BPM engine should be working in every Java environment, and this ‘helloworld’ is one example. API is clean, well documented and easy to work with. As a developer who correlates BPM engines to application servers that cannot start in under a minute, i am really pleased with what i was able to achieve. Overall experience with activiti is simply great.

*That* is the fuel that keeps us open source developers going! Thanks, Mr Sleepcoder!

Activiti Announces jBPM To Activiti Migration

2011-01-11T12:44:00.007+01:00

Since Activiti went GA on December 1st last year, we've been getting a lot of requests from people that want to migrate from jBPM to Activiti. [piece removed, see (*) in the comments]

When we started Activiti, we didn't plan any of those migrations as that would take a big chunk of our development resources. Converting jBPM's jPDL process xml files is only one piece of the puzzle. Migrating the runtime database data to a newer version of jBPM or to Activiti is the biggest challenge.

But Activiti progress has been faster then expected due to the overwhelming contributions by the community. Those were far beyond our expectations and hence we've been able to execute our roadmap faster then expected. As a result of our good progress and the demand expressed by our community, we are now able to revisit the choice of building migration from jBPM to Activiti.

This iteration, we'll start building jBPM 3 to Activiti migration in the community project including runtime database, history database and process definition migration. In the Activiti 5.2 release, planned for February 1st --less then 3 weeks from now--, you can expect the first drop of migration functionality. Though it will be hard to achieve 100% coverage, we hope that in subsequent releases of the migration, we'll be able to convert most jBPM 3 installations automatically. And for those aspects that we can't cover in a generic way, we'll provide good reports and hooks so that developers can customize the migration to deal with their specific situation.

Activiti 5.1 Release Adds Activiti KickStart

2011-01-04T15:58:00.011+01:00

The highlights for the 5.1 Activiti release:

Added Activiti KickStart (more about this new component below)
Added automatic upgrade of the DB schema from 5.0 to 5.1
Added generation and display of process definition diagram based on DI information.
Added historic task instances
Added Comments to artifacts in Cycle
Improved Cycle Plug-In Infrastructure (now using Annotations)
Fixed various bugs

Activiti KickStart is a new component for which I want to share this quick introduction. It makes building process solutions as easy as 1, 2, 3 for non technical business people. In essence, Activiti KickStart allows you to enter the steps as a list of text fields and Activiti

KickStart will create a BPMN process for you based on your input.

In addition, the same simple paradigm also lets you create forms with each step in the process.
This form, then looks like this in Activiti Explorer

This way non technical business users can create fully functional process models. And if later more advanced process authoring needs to be done, we allow for seamless migration from Activiti KickStart to the more advanced, fully fledged Activiti Modeler, which is our web based BPMN process authoring tool.

More about Activiti KickStart in Joram's blog post

Download Activiti & share your experiences!

Activiti Devoxx Presentation

2010-12-02T17:35:00.002+01:00

Just 2 weeks after devoxx, all the conference sessions are already online. Our session Activiti in Action is definitely worth the 79 EUR for the subscription. And then you get all the other sessions for free! The Activiti session includes a nice demo and shows that you can get up and running with Activiti in less then a minute.

Prepare For Impact: Activiti 5.0 GA Released

2010-12-01T10:28:00.025+01:00

Today we are very proud to announce the first official release for General Availability (GA) of Activiti. In less then 9 months after we left the jBPM team, we've built a broad collaborating community and together we've build the next generation BPM Platform and an astonishing feature list.

There are a couple of crucial decisions Alfresco took when launching Activiti that made these spectacular results possible. First the combination of the liberal Apache license with

the new BPMN 2.0 standard rocks. 2 of the community companies are actually in the BPMN 2.0 specification: Alfresco and Camunda.

Timing of the standard and this new project has very good to us as well. Alfresco's gave us the opportunity as ex-jBPM founders to build Activiti as a separate brand and run it as an independent project. That really has been a boost to build this broad community quickly. Given that this strategy has played out even beyond our initial high expectations, we believe we're in for a profound impact on the BPM world.

Here's an overview of what's in this first final release:

85 pages of documentation
Super easy demo install that gets you up and running in less then a minute

Activiti Engine

Easy embeddable (just include the .jar)
Excellent Spring integration (contributed by SpringSource)
Support for all common BPMN 2.0 elements
Easy to link any type of Java to process steps
Event listeners
Transactional timers
Audit trails
Flexible transaction management
Extremely fast / minimal execution overhead
Full Query API
REST interface

Activiti Explorer

Easy task management
Starting new process instances
Claiming group tasks
Starting processes andcompleting tasks with or without forms
Easy deployment of forms with processes

Activiti Probe

Operational management console
Managing deployment
Business archive file upload
Managing jobs
View database table contents

Activiti Designer

Contributed by Tijs, Ron, Tiese and Yvo from Atos Origin
Eclipse plugin
New Activiti project and diagram wizzards
Graphical process modeling
Form support for Activiti extensions
Pluggable activity types! Fully documented!
Unit test generation
Validation with errors showing in Eclipse Problem view

Activiti Cycle

Contributed by Camunda
BPM collaboration done right
Spans business users, developers and system admins
Repos: Activiti Modeler, SVN, JIRA, File system
Linking of artifacts in repos
Pluggable actions depending on the artifact type

Activiti Modeler

Contributed by Signavio
Web based graphical BPMN 2.0 authoring
Saves models in a shared file based repository
Very intuitive to use!

Other integration contributions

Special thanks to Next Level Integration for hosting the continuous integration hudson service!

We're also very excited about the Manning book for which the early access program will start real soon. Watch out for Activiti in Action by Tijs Rademakers en Ron van Liempd.

But all this just means that you can start using Activiti now and that we can get started on the 5.1 ;-)

Download Activiti

Here are the instructions to get up and running in less then a minute.

What are you waiting for ?!

We're Almost There: Activiti 5.0.rc1 Released

2010-10-30T11:13:00.006+02:00

We've added the last important features to Activiti and the architecture and API's are now stable. Next month will be mainly bug fixing to make it robust for production usage. Special thanks to Next Level Integration and Christian Muelder for hosting and setting up a complete QA/CI environment including all the databases.

We're very excited with the Spring integration in Activiti. You can configure your process engine in a Spring context like this:

<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.TransactionAwareDataSourceProxy">
...
</bean>

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DataSourceTransactionManager">
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
</bean>

<bean id="processEngine" class="org.activiti.spring.ProcessEngineFactoryBean">
<property name="databaseType" value="h2" />
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
<property name="transactionManager" ref="transactionManager" />
<property name="dbSchemaStrategy" value="drop-create" />
<property name="deploymentResources" value="classpath*:/org/activiti/spring/test/autodeploy.*.bpmn20.xml" />
</bean>

<bean id="repositoryService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getRepositoryService" />
<bean id="runtimeService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getRuntimeService" />
<bean id="taskService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getTaskService" />
<bean id="historyService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getHistoryService" />
<bean id="managementService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getManagementService" />

Beans can then be referenced just like process variables from expressions --even with parameters-- in the process like this:

<serviceTask id="createLoanRequest"
           activiti:expression="${loanRequestBean.newLoanRequest(customerName, amount)}"
           activiti:resultVariableName="loanRequest"/>

Highlights of this release:

Activiti Probe added Job and Deployment management
Event listeners
Query for process instances based on variable values
Parameterized method expressions
History details and audit capabilities
Extracted FormService and improved flexible form handling
Activiti config file from properties to xml
PostgreSQL en Oracle support
Improved DB performance by fine tuning indexes
Check out all 62 Jira issues of this release

Check out the 10 minute Getting Started tutorial, the comprehansive 60+ page User Guide documentation or the Javadocs.

By now, you should be as excited as we are about the release. I won't keep you longer in suspension and share the download link now: Go get it!

Activiti Focus On The Alfresco DevCons

2010-10-01T12:49:00.002+02:00

There's going to be a lot of focus on Activiti in the Alfresco Developer Conferences. There's one in Paris October 20-21 and one in New York Nov 3-4. So those are ideal opportunities to learn more about the new BPMN 2.0 Apache licensed Activiti project.

Use this special discount code for the Activiti community to get a 25% discount: AlfMeetup10

Activiti 5.0.beta2 Released

2010-09-30T18:06:00.002+02:00

After a really exciting and productive month, we're proud to present Activiti 5.0.beta2:

Added Activiti Designer, an eclipse plugin for process authoring targetted for developers
- Design BPMN processes grafically: start event, end event, sequence flow, parallel gateway, exclusive gateway, embedded subprocess, script task, user task and service task.
- Generate JUnit test case by right click on the process in the package explorer
- Run the JUnit test with an embedded h2 database
- Configure Java class for a service task
- Configure assignee or candidate for a user task
- Configure script with a script task
Added DB support for MySQL and PostgreSQL
Activiti Modeler and Activiti Engine are now synced on the final BPMN 2.0 specification
New improved version of Activiti Modeler
Loads of Activiti Cycle improvements
Added JDK 5 compatibility
Added history activity instances
Added unit testing support
Added email support and receive activity
Added optimistic locking for out-of-the-box clustering support
Added more query APIs
Minor API cleanup

Download Activiti 5.0.beta2 or browse the userguide or the javadocs.

Also interesting to check out is the Activiti Grails plugin.

Enjoy!

Camunda Screencast Of BPM Collaboration With Activiti

2010-09-24T11:21:00.004+02:00

Camunda compiled an excellent screencast showing how the different Activiti components work together. It's based on the latest 5.0.beta1 release.

Camunda leads the Activiti Cycle component that facilitates collaboration between business people, developers and system admins.

We are very proud to have Camunda as part of the Activiti community because they have a huge experience of hands-on BPM projects and that expertise and vision is vital for building the practical BPM collaboration features of Activiti Cycle. Glad to have you on board, Guys!

Screencast Of Activiti On The iPhone

2010-09-23T13:50:00.006+02:00

Only a day after Signavio launched process modeling on the iPad, we're here to present the iPhone version of Activiti Explorer, the app to check your task list and complete tasks using forms. Click on the iPhone to see the demo screencast

Yuri Horbach earned our utmost respect. Congrats, Yuri! Very well done.

Yuri will aim to have this app available through the AppStore in October.

More information can be found in the wiki page Activiti and iPhone. Watch that page to be kept up to date on this cool feature!

Tunnel Vision In The BPM Market

2010-09-20T10:52:00.009+02:00

InfoQ's Will Business Adopt BPMN 2.0? made me write up my thoughts on a blind spot in the BPM world.

Very big attention goes to the business side of BPM. And that is for good reason as that is the side that makes the money go round. Bruce Silver's quest to learn everyone the fine grained details of BPMN is really valuable. That's what I consider the efforts needed from the business side to align business and IT. The levels of BPMN that Bruce initiated are really important and make it possible for BPMN to support a broad audience, from occasional reader to full time business analyst. I believe BPMN contains already depth enough as the finest details are probably only reserved for the happy few.

The technical side of BPM (and BPMN for that matter) does not get the same depth of attention. Historically, BPM's goal was to eliminate the need for IT people all together. Recently a general awareness has grown that IT and developers can't really be replaced by non tech business analysts using a magical BPM System.

But many people in BPM don't seem to get the full implications of that trend. This post is a protest against the tunnel vision that seems to be as stubborn as a greenpeace activist in a rubber boat. In the industry, everyone talks about business-IT alignment. But only the business aspects are looked at in depth. The requirements that technical people have for BPM Systems are still overlooked and ignored.

The challenge for BPM system builders is: "How can we offer this tool to developers so that they can provide business people with the agility they need?" That's where there has been a painful silence.

One aspect that has been tackled properly in the BPMS community is web services. BPMN 2.0 is basically a superset of BPEL. That is good. In the infrastructure of an average organization, you'll find many off-the-shelf products and internal components that expose functionalities as web services. So there is definitely the technical need to call out to web services from a BPMN process. A good BPMS should make it easy to call out to web services and to deal with the data manipulations of XML structured data.

The mistake of associating BPM with webservices (cfr BPEL) in the past comes from a lack of technical depth in BPM. From a CIO perspective, it might make sense to standardize on web services for communication between different systems in an organization. But assuming such a unified web services world as a prerequisite is really shortsighted. Building a BPM System with a hard dependency on a WSDL infrastructure and places such BPM solutions automatically in a niche.

As a first example, RESTful web services have been given too little attention. Also those can be found in many of today's organizations and hence the process language should be able to work with them easily.

Even more so Java architectures are under emphasized. Calling a Spring bean from a BPMN process with a Java Unified Expression Language makes it so much easier for developers using Spring. The ability of the BPMS to use the dataSource bean and the transactionManager bean straight from the developers' Spring configuration is also needed to achieve agility. Another example is storing native Java objects as process variables. Or even easy linking between process and the user's domain objects that are persisted with JPA or hibernate. Also declarative transaction demarcation (aka asynchronous continuations) is a really valuable instrument to merge technical developer's concerns into a process for which the diagram is expressed on a business level.

As a side note, I'm very happy that BPMN 2.0 doesn't assume a unified WSDL world and makes it possible for BPM System vendors to build in native support for e.g. REST, Java, Grails or any other technical aspect.

Since as long as I can remember, the business-only focussed BPM market has always been very promising. And yet, that very market remains fragmented and volatile with each player fighting for a niche. I blame that clearly on the lack of technical insight into how BPM Systems should be build and offered to a development team.

In the past, the solution in the BPM industry was to broaden out to auxiliary functionalities such as simulation, optimization and collaboration. I don't want to criticize those functions individually, but many BPM vendors even claim that you have to have all these in order to do something useful. I'ld say that's smoke and mirrors. A BPM runtime engine alone should be able to offer value and make sense standalone. If that's not the case, all the other auxiliary functions won't fix it. As Peter Jones says (9:10): "That's stretching the brand as an elastic band. If you stretch it too far, the band breaks". BPM should go back to the basics: a runtime engine that runs executable business processes which are the result of a business-IT collaboration.

Instead of trying to exclude the developers from the equation in business-IT alignment, the BPM industry should think about what features the developers need in a BPM System so that the BPM System fits in their world also. Combining the software developers build with processes in a BPM System should painless. When the BPM System embeds seamless into the developers architecture, then developers can translate business changes faster and more effective into software updates.

Grails Activiti Plugin 5.0.beta1 Released

2010-09-13T09:12:00.003+02:00

Quoting Chee Kin:

Hi,

I would like to announce the Grails Activiti Plugin 5.0.beta1 Released.

Grails Activiti Plugin is created to integrate Activiti BPM Suite and workflow system to Grails Framework.
With the Grails Activiti Plugin, workflow application can be created at your fingertips!

What's new:
* Update Activiti's jar files and examples to 5.0.beta1.
* Introduced Dependency Injection for RuntimeService, RepositoryService and HistoryService (API Update).

You can find out more about this plugin at following links:
* Project Site and Documentation: http://code.google.com/p/grails-activiti-plugin/
* Support: http://code.google.com/p/grails-activit ... ssues/list

Regards,
Chee Kin

http://forums.activiti.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=247

Well, done, Chee!

What Do BPM Industry Experts Say About Activiti?

2010-09-01T09:52:00.002+02:00

James Tayler had a first look at Activiti. It's a very accurate and well written overview of Alfresco's motivations and the direction of the Activiti project. He concludes:I liked the potential of the collaboration environment to bridge the gaps when rules and process are both being used in a solution and I also liked the potential of applying content management to business rules. Interesting ideas both of them and I look forward to learning more.

This confirms what the BPM Analysts have said about us at the launch. Joram created a nice overview of the reactions:

Sandy Kemsley, renowned BPM analyst, wrotea an objective analysis of the Activiti platform. She is eager to see how Activiti will evolve. And we won’t dissapoint her.

BPM expert Scott Francis of BP3 wrote a very motivating blogpost. He actually downloaded the distribution and played with it. Let me quote him a few times here

“Did I mention that the whole stack ran just fine, natively, on my Mac as well as a Windows VM?”
“The documentation is already pretty comprehensive, and gets down to no-nonsense details (not true for many commercial products).”
“I think the market is ripe for an open source BPM platform that leverages standard underlying technologies and is built from the beginning to allow for cloud-based deployment”
“We may end up investing some time in the project ourselves.”

The 451 Group posted a spot-on business analysis of the announcement, and let me quote them:

Activiti is likely to shake-up the BPM market with a ubiquitous project that supports the BPMN 2.0 standard from the Object Management Group.

Peter Hilton from Lunatech Research, hits the nail on the head:

business processes and work-flow are aspects of most business software and integratingembeddable BPM will be a key element in reducing the cost of business software development.

Theo Priestly asks the question everybody wanted to ask: “has the fight for open-source dominance begun?”

It's great fun to shake the BPM market ;-)

Activiti 5.0.beta1 Rocks

2010-09-01T09:31:00.002+02:00

This release

Adds a first preview of Activiti Cycle, contributed by Camunda. Bernd explains Activiti Cycle.
Adds documentation about the Spring integrations
We extracted the Process Virtual Machine as a separate module

Enjoy!

and let us know what you think.

Alfresco Developer Conferences In Paris And New York

2010-08-26T15:37:00.003+02:00

The timing of the Alfresco Developer Conferences couldn't be better for Activiti. The one in Paris is October 20-21 and the one in New York is 3-4 November: Exactly around the time that Activiti 5.0 GA will be released.

I'll be speaking together with Joram about it and also Erik Winlof who started the Activiti Explorer and Activiti Probe web UI's is present so you can expect some nice demos and concrete insights.

Hope to see you there!

Activiti And The BPM Market In A Nutshell

2010-08-19T09:24:00.009+02:00

Too much happened to fit into 140 char twitter message so I decided to write the summary here, but first this side note: Elke delivered Joram 2.0 early (probably it will not be often, but hey...) He's called Lars. Congrats to the whole family!

Last release of August 1st already includes a decent coverage of BPMN activity types. Summer time is a great time to get some coding done. Last couple of weeks were really hard core coding with fine tuning of the core engine. We extracted the Process Virtual Machine as a separate module, added a super efficient event mechanism and optimized the DB persistence to the max. First of all, the runtime data is kept to a minimal, with minimal updates during process execution. On top of that, if a parallel gateway forks again, the joined executions are now actually recycled. It's good for performance and the environment! It's amazing that I still find significant optimizations after I've been coding core BPM engines since 2003.

Tijs Rademakers (from Open Source ESB's in Action) got started on a book called BPMN 2.0 with Activiti in Action. I already look forward to reading it.

Josh Long created an Activiti integration with Spring Integration. He's going to show it at JavaZone. Don't miss it.

Furthermore there is an Activiti BPMN 2.0 eclipse designer and an iPhone app in the pipeline. Really cool stuff. More about that later.

But what does that mean for the BPM market in general? Wel... this morning I was cycling to the office and I actually came across the perfect boat metaphors to illustrate what's happening in the BPM market. First I saw this:

That is a really good metaphore for the typical traditional BPM player: Inert, not in the shape that it once was but it's floating.

Then I passed along this one:

That's Activiti: New, fast, agile and fun to work with!

And then I saw what's going to happen with the traditional BPM players after Activiti the GA release in November:

Oh no!

;-)

Activiti 5.0.alpha4 Released

2010-08-04T10:16:00.002+02:00

We just released Activiti 5.0.alpha4. Joram published a very nice tutorial based on this release and also the following bullet item list:

Improvements
MySQL support
Support for method expressions on sequence flow
Revised ActivityExecution API
Added ConcurrencyController API
Process Event Bus
Taskforms: added date and date picker support
Explorer: changed process definition drop down list to a separate page
New features
BPMN parallel gateway
BPMN manual task
BPMN (embedded) subprocess
BPMN call activity (subprocess)
BPMN Java service task
Spring integration (experimental, no docs yet)
Bugfixes
Made engine compatible with BPMN 2.0 beta process models
Fixed exception on windows and linux when using boundary timer event
Expression cannot have whitespaces

Download the 5.0.alpha4 here.

Grails Plugin For Activiti

2010-07-19T10:40:00.002+02:00

One of my respected OSS father figures ones said "Open Source Software doesn't fall out of the sky" At the time, I believed it.

Since starting Activiti, I start to have my doubts. A lot of companies already joined with real contributions. And now I just came back from holiday and I find a Grails Plugin for Activiti being announced with very nice features. ...like it fell out of the sky. Amazing ;-)

Welcome to the community, Chee!

Mulesoft Joins Activiti

2010-07-06T12:26:00.002+02:00

Mulesoft joins the Activiti team. Their focus will be to make sure that Activiti integrates with Mulesoft and help building the BPMN web service orchestration capabilities.

This really puts another milestone in the life of Activiti. Historically, we (the ex jBPM team) have been focussed on BPM in a plain Java environment. We're thrilled to have these Mulesoft on board. Their experience in the field will ensure that Activiti has web service and ESB support that covers the real life use cases.

Esteban Robles Luna from Mulesoft will become an core Activiti developer. It was a pleasure meeting you last week, Esteban! Welcome to the team.

We now have a very broad set of expertises united in the Activiti project. Consolidation is really happening even faster then we expected. Exciting times!

Complementary Commitments

2010-07-05T08:57:00.004+02:00

Last week we had the Activiti Community Kickoff Meeting. We revised the roadmap from now till November in the context of the new contributing companies. The spirit was great.

What struck me most was that the expertise that these companies bring forward is really complementary:

Alfresco: Core engine technology and BPMN
Mimacom: Core engine technology and task management
SpringSource: Making the designs DI friendly and general solid software design expertise
Camunda: BPMN and practical BPM collaboration
Next Level Integration: DB compatibility and high scalability
MuleSoft: Web services and ESB expertise

We've managed to distill concrete tasks for everyone within the domain of expertise and put this into a concrete planning. Not only did they bring their expertise and commitment, but also a solid dose of humor. That was a real good mix. It's a great environment to work. I'm happy and proud to be part of that group.

Activiti 5.0.alpha3 Released

2010-06-30T12:03:00.003+02:00

We're getting into a steady release rhythm. We just pushed 5.0.alpha3 out the door with following improvements:

JobExecutor
BPMN Timers
BPMN JSR 223 script support.
Switched from iBatis to MyBatis
Updated to a newer version of BPMN xsd
Query API
Switched JUnit usage from 3-style inheritance to 4-style annotations

Download here.

Onward to the next!

Alfresco Joins OMG To Participate In BPMN 2.0 RTF

2010-06-28T14:22:00.002+02:00

Alfresco knows that Open Source and standards is a rock solid combination. We (Alfresco) are a driving force behind the CMIS standard for ECM systems. Two months ago, we were the first ECM tool to deliver on CMIS compliancy.

So when Alfresco launched it's BPM initiative Activiti as Apache license and mentions a focus on BPMN 2.0, those is not a hollow words. We're very committed to BPMN 2.0. In fact, we're aiming to build the #1 BPMN 2.0 process engine and deliver the full BPM Suite components, all available as open source.

Historically, BPMN only targeted the notation and BPML was intended as the language and file format. BPML was already deprecated long ago in favour of BPEL. But now more recently BPMN itself included the executable semantics and a file format. And we believe that in some specific cases, the convenience for developers were overlooked.

The Activiti mission statement goes like this:

Make Business Process Management (BPM) ubiquitous
by offering solutions
that both business people and developers love.

In the past, we've built up experience in building an executable process language that also takes into account the developer needs. Given our background and current mission, we believe there is a role for us to play in the BPMN 2.0 committee. Luckily we made it in time to join the RTF from the start.

The business aspects are covered in great depth already. But our focus on the developer is quite unique. That is exactly what we want to contribute to the BPMN 2.0. Making sure that BPMN is convenient for both business people and developers.

Mimacom Joins Activiti

2010-06-24T17:16:00.003+02:00

Mimacom just joined the Activiti project. It shows that consolidation is really happening around Activiti. A steady stream of companies is joining with the common goal of building the #1 BPM System for BPMN 2.0.

We are very excited because Mimacom brings in this mix a vast amount of expertise on building the Edorasware process engine. That core process engine knowledge and Mimacom's serous commitment to participate will result in a significant acceleration of Activiti's progress.

I enjoyed the discussions we had so far and look forward to more of those starting next week in Stuttgart.

Micha, Agim, Christian and Stefan are a great addition to the team. Welcome, guys!

Activiti Community Kickoff Meeting

2010-06-23T00:20:00.003+02:00

Activiti took an awsome start last month.

After SpringSource, Camunda, Signavio and Next Level Integration, even more companies are joining the Activiti community. The snowball keeps rolling!

Next week thursday and friday we're going to kick off the Activiti community officially in Stuttgart, Germany. July 1st and 2nd, we'll be meeting up to bring out a toast and plan the roadmap more concrete between now and the 5.0 GA release in November. Looking forward to it!

If you're interested to meet up with the whole Activiti team over there, this is your chance. Send a mail to myfirstname at alfresco dot com.

First Activiti Presentation

2010-06-19T11:25:00.002+02:00

Last week, I gave the very first presentation at the B2B by practice summit in Koln, Germany. Next level integration organized this event and they are also a member of the Activiti community. Here are the slides:

2010 06-b2b bypracticesummit

View more presentations from Tom Baeyens.

Keeping A BPM System In Tune

2010-06-09T11:43:00.005+02:00

In very specific cases, a single person can cope with many distinct responsibilities.

But in general, it's easy to get out of tune that way and it's better to split up responsibilities in manageable pieces. The same goes for Business Process Management (BPM) tools. There are 2 very distinct aspects that are often mixed up. Especially traditional BPM solutions I believe are pretty bad at making the distinction between BPM as a management discipline and BPM as software engineering.

Keith Swenson already long time ago made a distinction between these aspects in BPM is not software engineering. In my opinion, these are 2 distinct aspects that are both valuable and they should not be mixed up. BPM as a management discipline can be practiced without the intention of automating them. Likewise, BPM as software engineering can be the most convenient technology way for a developer to implement certain technical requirements that don't have a meaning on a business level collaboration. Of course, the combination of both makes sense as well.

At Activiti, we don't want to end up with a single monolithic BPM System that takes on too much responsibilities and hence only becomes usable for specific nich cases. We clearly acknowledge the different nature of BPM as a management discipline and BPM as software engineering.

http://activiti.org/faq.html#WhatIsBpm

BPM as a management discipline is the responsibility of every strategic executive manager. It's to ensure that the organization performs well in their core business processes. This involves understanding what values the organization delivers and how those are achieved. This means analyzing, documenting and improving the way that people and systems work together. As part of that work, it's useful to work with models and diagrams. BPMN diagrams express the execution flow of the steps to accomplish a certain goal. Important to note that these models are used for people to people communication. They can be underspecified, which means that they can contain valuable high level information without including unnecessary details. Such underspecified process models are also known as abstract business processes.

BPM as software engineering means that executable business processes will be executed by a BPM System (BPMS). Executable business processes are based on a diagram that represents the different steps in an execution flow. The diagram can actually look exactly the same as the abstract business process. But executable business processes are different in some very fundamental ways. First of all they need more technical details. That part is generally accepted.

[read more...]

We believe that you should use the right tool for each job. And that collaboration should be facilitated on the Process Cycle Layer.

With the collaboration tool that we present there, you can see how we facilitate collaboration between business people, developers and system admins. And that without being intrusive. All of those people can't be forced to transition to a new single BPM system that does it all. But instead, with such a collaboration tool, we will facilitate the collaboration between those roles in a non intrusive way.

Activiti Keynote At B2B By Practice Summit

2010-06-08T09:14:00.002+02:00

Next week thursday, I'll be doing a first public talk on Activiti at the B2B by Practice summit in Cologne. That's an excellent occasion to find out about Activiti, the vision, the roadmap and more. Hope to see you there!

Activiti 5.0.alpha2 Released

2010-06-02T13:27:00.008+02:00

Activiti on steroids! Only 18 days after launching our brand new BPM Suite, we have another release ready for you. This release includes:

Task forms
Database table content viewer in Activiti Probe
BPMN 2.0 Exclusive gateway
Unified Expression Language support
Reduced download size (37MB --> 18.5MB, removed duplicated libs)

Too bad I can't show the dynamic effects of the user task forms in this screenshot. But check it out for yourself. With the automatic setup scripts, it takes you less then a minute to get all this running on your system.

It even work great on my new android phone ;-) Cool!

Enjoy!

And let us know what you think.

Practical BPM Collaboration

2010-05-27T10:37:00.002+02:00

There is a new form of Business Process Management (BPM) collaboration rising.

We have been exploring and documenting how we see the collaboration between business people, developers and sys admins in The Process Cycle Layer. Traditional BPM focusses on forward engineering or round trip engineering. But in our experience that is a bottleneck for mass adoption that we targeted previously and now with Activiti even more. In the Process Cycle Layer we sketch how that bottleneck in the collaboration can be removed by focussing on discussions, links and social interaction that spans the whole business process automation lifecycle.

Now, Bernd Ruecker just presented his ideas in Making the BPMN Roundtrip real. It turns out that those ideas align very well. They have been working out this idea in a project called camunda fox. This seems like a great validation of our thoughts. Very interesting stuff.

Next Level Integration Joins Activiti Team

2010-05-26T08:50:00.004+02:00

We're proud to announce that Next Level Integration joins the Activiti team. Next Level Integration is a consultancy firm with expertise in B2B communications between utility companies in the energy sector.

Next Level Integration is the driving force behind the open source project B2B by Practice. B2B by Practice provides Integration capabilities for intercompany data exchange. It includes support for conformance processes related to the german electricity and gas regulations and order collaboration.

In that context of building solutions for utility companies they have a lot of experience with building massively scalable systems that have to cope with extremely high throughput. They will use Activiti as their BPM and orchestration engine in their B2B by Practice project.

In Activiti, they will focus on ensuring that massive scalability and they'll also focus on adding database pluggability plus support and continuous integration for a range of databases.

Christian and Stefan, welcome to the team! Looking forward to work with you.

Active Endpoints, Chicken And Activiti

2010-05-24T13:29:00.010+02:00

We didn't anticipate to get that the launch of Activiti would get that much attention from BPEL vendor Active Endpoints. Nevertheless, we are very pleased with the recognition that can be implied from their reaction.

In a first post called "Activiti BPMS: neither fish nor fowl", Alex Neihaus (VP Marketing, Active Endpoints) starts with the coolest picture I've seen in a while:

The rest of that post is rather poor in terms of facts. He says

we’ve got no issue with the jBPM team moving to greener pastures to try and rescue a moribund open source project

The term moribund (means "in terminal decline") is hilarious if you know that jBPM had 25000 downloads per month. I don't know of any other BPM System being used as much. Further on, despite what is insinuated, we agree with the next part:

Above all, BPM is a management discipline. As our CTO Michael Rowley is fond of saying, BPM can be done with pens, whiteboards and Post-It notes.

They probably didn't take the time to go through our website. In our very first FAQ "What is BPM?" in which we clearly distinct between BPM as a management discipline and BPM as software engineering:

BPM as a management discipline is the responsibility of every strategic executive manager. It's to ensure that the organization performs well in their core business processes. ... This means analyzing, documenting and improving the way that people and systems work together. As part of that work, it's useful to work with models and diagrams. ... Important to note that these models are used for people to people communication. ...

BPM as software engineering means that executable business processes will be executed by a BPM System (BPMS). ...

The attention continues with Michael Rowley adding more argumentation in "Activiti BPM: is a process microkernel the way to go?" Michael start with

The idea of the process virtual machine is simple and appealing

So far so good.

The idea is that all of the hard work of developing a process engine can be put into a layer that is more general and abstract than any process definition language. Then, when anyone wants to create a process engine based on a new language, it is a simple matter to map the concepts of the new language onto the constructs of the PVM and voila: a new process engine!

Exactly! We did it for jPDL, BPEL, SEAM Pageflow, XPDL and now BPMN 2.0.

The link to Linus Torvalds microkernel stuff doesn't have any substance and it's pure FUD. Active Endpoints only makes a core piece open source (ActiveBPEL, GPL) and for which the actual product contains commercial licensed software:

You can use the ActiveBPEL engine under GPL v2 by downloading it from this website. Alternatively, you can acquire a Commercial License to Active Endpoints' ActiveVOS Enterprise product by contacting Active Endpoints.

For such company to use Linus Torvalds as part of their argumentation is actually ironic.

Then Michael aimes his guns on the Process Virtual Machine (PVM)

A traditionally developed BPMS will be on top of an application server and a database. The application server is on a JVM, which is on an operating system, which often is on top of a virtual machine. Every layer adds value but it also adds cost ... Is the cost/benefit tradeoff right for a PVM layer?
I’d say no.

I'ld say yes. In Activiti, the PVM actually runs BPMN 2.0 natively. So it's removing a level of indirection, rather then introducing one. The PVM itself is transparent. So if there is an error, you get a the error in the context of a BPMN 2.0 process. The structure of the PVM process is a 1-1 match with the structure of the original process. Same goes for all the other languages we ever built on the Process Virtual Machine.

Let's compare this to the alternative strategy proposed by Michael Rowley: BPMN to BPEL translation. Historically, BPEL is actually a graphical language and it was long time promoted as a real BPM language that business people could draw. Over the last 2-3 years, there has grown a general consensus that BPEL is capable, but not suited for BPM. More precise, BPEL might be good at orchestrating web services, but it is a clumsy way of doing BPM.

Then comes BPMN. I speculating that their engine architecture is not that flexible. Because now their solution is to translate BPMN into BPEL. Translating from one graphical language (BPMN) to another graphical language (BPEL) is adding an unecessary level of indirection. The BPEL still needs to be interpreted by an engine. And when then an error occurs, you get a BPEL error, not a BPMN error. And secondly, the translation step from BPMN to BPEL is very problematic to say the least. So I can understand that they are not at easy with our new Activiti project running BPMN 2.0 natively.

The general tone of the posts try to imply that Activiti is only for developers. But that's just one aspect of our new project. Developers form one important target group to which we want to bring BPM capabilities. Alfresco ECM customers is another very important group. Both groups will benefit from our practical approach to facilitating collaboration between business people, IT folks and system operators.

So in my opinion, the only way I can interpret this attention is as pure FUD from a scared vendor. We're honored with so much recognition in our very first week ;-)

On Brand, Credibility And Open Source Licenses

2010-05-20T22:06:00.009+02:00

Bill Burke, a dear friend and respected JBoss Rockstar, posted some critical notes about the Apache vs LGPL license in response to Savio's "New BPM project questions value of LGPL"

Savio raises the point

On one hand, the JBoss Application Server, an LGPL licensed product, has garnered strong downloads and continues to grow revenue at a faster pace than Red Hat’s Linux business. It would seem that the LGPL hasn’t been a hindrance to JBoss Application Server adoption. On the other hand, as Newton points out, some ISVs, and as I’ve heard, some customers, remain concerned about viral licenses. While the LGPL was created to specifically address the viral nature of the GPL, some ISVs and customers remain weary.

To me, the most important difference between the LGPL and Apache license is summarized in: "some customers remain concerned about viral licenses"

I agree with a lot of points that Bill makes in response:

the OSS license chosen for a project is not that important as far as adoption or business goes. The most important driver for OSS is and always has been the brand of the project. Like their commercial counterparts, how the project is perceived by consumers is what drives both adoption and business. So, I agree, LGPL doesn’t add a lot of value.

and

If you boil it down, the distinctions betwen GPL, LGPL, and ASL are pretty much meanlingless to most consumers of OSS. How so? ...

I would rephrase those 2 quotes as "Brand and credibility is the most important aspect to an open source project, followed by the license".

But then I think Bill goes overboard on

The whole push by Apache.org and its minions that ASL is the one true license is just damaging to open source.

I'ld like to clarify that we don't consider Apache to be the one true license. It happens to be the license that allows us to exploit our brand and credibility, without being hindered by some customers' LGPL concerns (even if they would be unjustified). So it's more a practical choice instead of a religious one.

Back in 2003, a group of JBoss contributors tried to fork both the JBoss code base and the JBoss business. ... We then come full circle to 2010 with history repeating itself (well, sort of). You have Tom Baeyens leaving Red hat for Alfresco to create a competing BPM engine.

I don't see the association between those two events. On the contrary, I do see in the JBoss fork a confirmation that brand and credibility wins from license: JBoss brand was *much* stronger then CDN. Similarly, the JBoss brand and credibility was bigger then Gluecode/Geronimo credibility.

I even more disagree with

If you are an Apache guy, you should be appalled by behavior like this when it happens. Individuals and companies that use ASL as a weapon to further their own selfish and commercial needs should be castigated...

Well... everyone in this business wants to make a living. I don't think JBoss or LGPL-focused companies are different from companies working with Apache license in that respect ;-) It's a different kind of dynamics and you have to select what best suites your needs. In our case, we wanted to aim for mass adoption and scale out the community. The more liberal license has allowed us to unite more forces in one community then was possible in an LGPL/JBoss style. The community we have assembled up to now (4 days and counting;-) is far beyond what was possible before.

Granted, this comes at a price. We can't relax. We have to keep leading and keep making steady progress to prevent forking. If we stall, then the community will take over and fork more easily. I think this move deserves more recognition for courage, rather then being castigated.

As for LGPL vs. ASL? I could care less, it really doesn’t matter.

I take it you mean that the license of an open source project does not correlate 1 on 1 to its value. I fully agree.

You don’t see JBoss caring so much either.

My experience was different ;-)

Anyways, I agree with your last statement:

Anyways, have fun with this, and remember taking any one position to seriously is unhealthy.

Under whatever license we play it, I'm looking forward to our next match of poker or pool.

Alfresco Creates Activiti

2010-05-17T09:04:00.010+02:00

Today, Alfresco launches a new open source project called Activiti (http://activiti.org) It's a open source Apache licensed BPM engine supporting BPMN 2.0 natively. We are very excited as we believe this project will be very disruptive in the BPM industry. Activiti will be run as a independent project. Me and Joram Barrez left Red Hat and joined Alfresco as employees to lead Activiti. We've assembled an impressive list of team members and companies involved over the last two months.

The first target of Activiti is to achieve the same developer friendliness that we established at jBPM. But this time, with the we have more liberal license, more companies involved and more resources. So we'll be able to build out very slick tools on top of the embeddable engine. A big thanks to the Alfresco UI designers for shaping the UI of these first alpha version.

Thanks to the Process Virtual Machine design, apart from BPMN 2.0, Activiti will also be able to support other process Domain Specific Languages (DSL). And because we're building it from the ground up, we can prepare it properly for the cloud as that has a profound impact on the design of a BPM engine.

Take a look at our website and the first alpha version that we also release today that includes several components and even a REST interface.

SpringSource is also excited to be part of the Activiti community. SpringSource is very interested in adding BPM capabilities to their stack. So they will help ensuring that this engine runs smoothly on the SpringSource stack. They will also contribute knowledge to run Activiti in the cloud.

Signavio is participating in the Activiti community by contributing a customized version of their leading web based BPMN modeler.

And Camunda brings a vast amount of experience with practical BPM implementations into the mix.

Together our ambition is to build the clear #1 BPM engine. And with this initial community, I am confident we'll be able to do exactly that.

Standalone BPM Is Dead

2010-05-11T11:51:00.003+02:00

Standalone Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) have a big potential. A BPMS is aimed to simplify creation of software support for core business processes in an organization. For processes that are modeled on a business level, the automatically generated statistics provide for crucial business intelligence. That's all great.

But standalone BPM Systems have two main problems:

High cost of setup. This implies getting the software up and running and also get all people up to speed with the technology.
High cost of integrating the BPM system with the outside world. Web services or even specific adapters for communicating with other applications results in a significant threshold.

The result is that you need a big number of processes with high complexity for a standalone BPM system to pay off. I believe that is one of the main reasons why traditional standalone BPM remained a fragmented market with only niche players.

BPM should instead be offered where it's used.

Originally with jBPM, we focussed on developers. We provided BPM and workflow capabilities in the hands of the developers. We offered those feature in the world of the developer. Instead of requiring JTA to combine the application transaction with the BPM system transaction, we went a big step further. We offered the capability of the BPM system leveraging the transaction of the application itself whether that is Hibernate, Spring, EJB or anything else. Our next challenge in this respect is the cloud. Leveraging the cloud in the NoSQL interpretation of the word has a profound impact on some of the design decisions. The new project is build from the ground up with those new IT requirements in mind.

We embedded BPM into a developers world. It lowered the threshold to start using BPM and that opened up a new world of use cases for BPM. By making it so easy, even for small processes it becomes worth while to start using a BPM system. In our new project, we will certainly keep that focus on the developer and application embeddability.

With open source distribution and application embeddability we showed with jBPM that BPM can scale to a much more widespread adoption then any other individual BPM product had done before.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is another great use case for which it makes a lot of sense to offer the BPM capabilities where they are used. In the industry over the last 2 years you see more and more focus on bringing these worlds together. It makes a lot of sense.

An ECM system is a great environment where embedded BPM can lower investment to start collecting the fruits. Imagine a monthly meeting for which meeting minutes need to be reviewed and only after approval of the key attendees, the minutes need to be sent out to a wider audience. Would you setup a BPM system for that? I don't think so. But if that capability is offered inside the ECM system, then return on investment is instant. Again this is our strategy that will opens up BPM to scale far beyond it's typical niche.

With our new project we'll keep focus on the advanced processes capabilities. And we'll make sure that the runtime engine can be embedded easily in both the java world and in the ECM world.

Standalone BPM products that don't offer BPM where it's used are on a dead end in my opinion.

Open Source BPMN 2.0 Will Produce More Features In Proprietary Products

2010-03-31T09:59:00.002+02:00

By now, we know what happens when an Open Source Software (OSS) is created in an arena full of proprietary vendors. First of all because of the free availability, the technology is more used and more knowledge about the technology is spread to the masses.

We're already seeing a big momentum around BPMN 2.0. And us bringing a BPMN 2.0 OSS offering will help spread the knowledge and adoption beyond the critical mass.

For other OSS technologies like ESB's or appservers this happened late in the game, long after proprietary vendors had settled themselves. Typically the advent of an OSS offering started making the technology a commodity. Proprietary vendors are then pushed to produce more features on top of what is commodity in order to keep making money.

So it's going to be interesting to see what happens if we're one of the first native BPMN 2.0 solutions.

If you're interested in Business Process Management (BPM), then this new development is really important. Both OSS and proprietary vendors are embracing a single technology for BPM. That is a huge step forward from the past where previously all the pure-play BPM solutions were based on different concepts and proprietary languages. Going forward, the language choice will be easy.

One technology can be used by both non technical business people and developers. And when OSS enters the BPMN 2.0 space, you'll have more choices of products. On the one hand, the initial treshold to get started gets lower with OSS for the masses being freely available. And on the other hand you'll see more features in the proprietary offerings if you want to pay for it.

Alive And Kicking

2010-03-29T10:42:00.006+02:00

You might have seen the Open letter to the jBPM community explaining that me and Joram step down from the jBPM project. We just want to let you know that we're alive and kicking. We're building a new BPM platform that's architected for new IT requirements. It will be Apache licensed and it will run BPMN 2.0 natively. Exciting times ahead!

That's all we can share at this point. Keep posted for more information.

BPMN Modelling To Executable Unit Testing In 12 Minute Screencast

2010-01-29T09:46:00.004+01:00

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:

Learning jBPM Is Good For Your Salary

2010-01-22T10:55:00.003+01:00

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

Camunda Publishes Insightful BPMN PraxisHandbuch

2010-01-19T11:12:00.004+01:00

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 :-)

Blending Processes And Rules With jBPM

2010-01-15T15:05:00.020+01:00

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

2010-01-15T09:29:00.003+01:00

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

jBPM 4.3 Includes BPMN 2.0

2010-01-06T09:27:00.006+01:00

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

2009-12-23T09:34:00.002+01:00

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

2009-12-16T11:02:00.005+01:00

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:

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

2009-12-16T10:13:00.004+01:00

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

2009-12-16T09:54:00.003+01:00

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

2009-12-10T09:14:00.003+01:00

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

2009-12-07T17:28:00.005+01:00

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

2009-11-24T15:46:00.006+01:00

"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

2009-11-19T16:49:00.006+01:00

...

'nough said.

Devoxx Starts Strong, Lot Of Attention For jBPM

2009-11-18T11:26:00.002+01:00

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?

2009-11-12T14:43:00.003+01:00

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

2009-10-30T17:06:00.007+01:00

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

2009-09-16T09:05:00.004+02:00

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

2009-09-09T16:37:00.003+02:00

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

2009-09-09T08:52:00.002+02:00

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.

Upcoming Speaking Schedule

2009-09-07T14:12:00.004+02:00

Last weeks JBossWorld was a blast. We presented the jBPM 4.1 release, which includes our web based modeller powered by Signavio. That was very well received and generated a lot of traction. And of cource, at conferences like that, it's always nice to meet the faces behind the internet names :-)

For those who have missed JBossWorld, here's our list of upcoming jBPM talks:

RivieraJUG in Nice (France) on October 2nd
"jBPM 4: What does it do and why do I need it?"

Java Developer Day in Cracow (Poland) on October 16th
Keynote: "Pimp up your domain model with jBPM"

Devoxx (Belgium)
University talk: "jBPM 4 in Action" on November 16th
Conference session: "jBPM 4 in Action" on November 18th

Don't miss these events if you're in the neighbourhood. If you know any other jBPM related talks, please add them as a comment.

jBPM 4.1 Released

2009-09-01T23:13:00.004+02:00

Just in time for JBossWorld, we released jBPM 4.1. We're very proud that our collaboration with Signavio and Oryx already lead to the first results.
The web based jPDL process designer is now part of our download. Certainly worth a try.

Other things that we added

End-to-end demo: JBPM-2480
Improved installer to handle tomcat and more configuration options : JBPM-2409
Extended coverage of Continuous Integration and reduced the execution time
Tomcat support in the console : JBPM-2353
Fix process variables of type hibernate-long-id/hibernate-string-id : JBPM-2474
Tomcat continious integration : JBPM-2409
Domain model integration : JBPM-2474
And a bunch of bug fixes

More details in our JIRA.

Download it from sourceforge and enjoy it.

JBossWorld: 8 Chances To Learn More About jBPM

2009-08-13T13:08:00.004+02:00

There's a big focus on jBPM at next month at JBossWorld. There's 8 talks related to jBPM. Cool!

jBPM Explained with Simple Use Cases
Tom Baeyens — Founder and Lead of JBoss jBPM (that's me :-)

Using JBoss Enterprise Middleware in NAVTEQ
Boris Lublinsky — Lead Architect, NAVTEQ

How to Combine Web, SOA and jBPM to Deliver a Flexible Case Management Platform for Public/Government e-Services
Jean-Marc Reymond — Team Leader for Java/SOA for Solutions Norway, Redpill Linpro

Using JBoss jBPM and JBoss ESB to build a high customizable multi-tenant platform
Frederico Melo — Senior Solution Architect, Ericsson

Competitive Advantage with Open Source Business Process Automation
Pierre Fricke — Director of Product Line Management, Red Hat

Business Agility with Process Centric Solutions
Jay Liu — Director of System Development, Clarks

A Collaborative Platform for the Pharmaceutical Industry using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and Alfresco
Alaaeldin El-Nattar — Principal Architect, Rivet Logic Corporation

Birds of a Feather: SOA, ESB, Rules, BPM, EDA
Kevin Conner, Tom Baeyens, Edson Tirelli, Burr Sutter

I'm looking forward to the event. If you want to meet up with me during JBossWorld, drop me an email.

jBPM User Interaction Patterns

2009-08-12T10:13:00.002+02:00

Boris Lublinsky posted a high quality article at InfoQ about jBPM User Interaction Patterns that shows how jBPM simplifies interactions with people through tasklists. Certainly worth a read!

jBPM Conquers The White House?

2009-08-11T12:33:00.011+02:00

Eric Schabell wrote an article Full Scale Straight Through Processing with BPM, explaining how jBPM was used in a Financial Institution. The article got accepted into the 2009 BPM and Workflow Handbook.

And now the good part comes. Eric writes:

As the focus of this book was BPM in government, the publisher has sent a copy to the President of the United States with a personal cover letter.

Awsome !

We can already imagine the next conversation between President Obama and Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary:

Starting JBoss And Tomcat Blocking Till Boot Is Completed

2009-08-10T11:05:00.004+02:00

Our build is maven based. The jBPM project contains a bunch of modules. We have several integration test suites. Using the maven plugins to set up integration testing turned out to be insufficient. In order to keep our continuous integration builds platform independent we use a combination of ant scripts and mvn builds.

The strategy of our integration testing is that we start from a distribution that we unpack. Scripts like installing jBPM on JBoss are also interesting for our users. So they are included in the distribution. Then our Continuous Integration (CI) scripts leverage those scripts from the distribution. That way also those jBPM installer scripts also get validated by the CI.

For JBoss the CI build works as follows:

Build a distribution (mvn -Pdistro clean install)
Unzip the jBPM distribution file
Unzip JBoss
Use the install script from the distribution to install jBPM in JBoss
Customzie the jBPM installation for execution of the test suite
Start JBoss
Recreate the jBPM database schema
Run the integration test suite remotely
- jBPM testsuite uses the plain jBPM API
- Instead of executing the commands in the testrun itself, jBPM is configured to translate all invocations to remote EJB calls transparantly
Drop the jBPM database schema
Shut down JBoss

Since jBPM 3 we have an ant task that starts a JBoss instance in the background, but waits for the server boot to complete before the ant task finishes. That way we're sure that after the

task completes, that the server is up and running and ready to serve requests. We've done this in ant for a long time with an ant task and a Launcher. The StartJBossTask will create a Launcher thread, starts it and joins for it to complete.

public class StartJBossTask extends Task {

 private static final String END_MESSAGE = " Started in ";

 public void execute() throws BuildException {
   try {
     // build the command string
     String command = ...build the command string...;

     // launch the command and wait till the END_MESSAGE appears
     Thread launcher = new Launcher(this, command, END_MESSAGE, null);
     launcher.start();
     launcher.join();
    
   } catch (Exception e) {
     e.printStackTrace();
   }
 }
 ...

The Launcher is a thread that spawns a process and listens to its InputStream till a certain message is displayed on the console by the spawned process.

public class Launcher extends Thread {

 Task task;
 String command;
 String endMsg;
 File dir;

 public Launcher(Task task, String command, String endMsg, String dir) {
   this.task = task;
   this.command = command;
   this.endMsg = endMsg;
   this.dir = (dir!=null ? new File(dir) : null);
 }

 public void run() {
   try {
     task.log("starting '" + command + "'...");
     Process process = new ProcessBuilder(command)
       .directory(dir)
       .start();

     BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
     String line = "";
     while (line.indexOf(endMsg) == -1) {
       line = reader.readLine();
       task.log(line);
     }

     task.log("'" + command + "' started.");
   } catch (IOException e) {
     throw new BuildException("couldn't start '" + command + "'", e);
   }
 }
}

Last week I wanted to do the same for Tomcat. When leveraging that code just the same way as works for JBoss, Tomcat only showed environment variables and then hanged:

Using CATALINA_BASE:   C:\Software\apache-tomcat-6.0.20
Using CATALINA_HOME:   C:\Software\apache-tomcat-6.0.20
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: C:\Software\apache-tomcat-6.0.20\temp
Using JRE_HOME:        C:\Software\jdk1.5.0_11

Can you spot what is wrong ? Well... it took quite some time for me and that is why I'm sharing it here.

The clue is that Tomcat logging used not only standard output, but also standard error as output for logging. I could fix it by adding the .redirectErrorStream(true) like this:

      Process process = new ProcessBuilder(command)
        .redirectErrorStream(true)
        .directory(dir)
        .start();

So now we have Tomcat up and running, we couldn't leverage the same remote EJB configuration as we did with JBoss. So for Tomcat CI, we leverage cactus and run the tests in the webapp.

Conclusion: When you fork a process in Java and you see it hangs unexpectedly, check if you're reading both input *and* its error stream. Or if it is for starting JBoss or Tomcat with ant, simply look in the jBPM sources.

Another Good Book On jBPM

2009-08-04T10:21:00.001+02:00

Jeff Davis just published his book "Open Source SOA". It includes 3 chapters fully dedicated to jBPM:

Part III Business process management
Chapter 5 Introducing jBPM
BPM: the “secret sauce” of SOA
History and overview of JBoss jBPM
Understanding nodes
Using transitions
Extending using actions
Using events for capturing lifecycle changes in a process
Managing context using variables
Summary

Chapter 6 jBPM tasks
What are tasks?
Task user management
Using timers
Task controllers
Developing with the task API
Summary

Chapter 7 Advanced jBPM capabilities
Important enterprise features of jBPM
Integration with SCA/SDO
Summary

The book also includes some interesting jBPM integrations like Service-enabling jBPM using Apache Tuscany and Integrating Esper with jBPM. Go check it out.

jBPM Interest Peaks

2009-08-03T14:32:00.004+02:00

Last month we crossed the chasm to a respectable 30'000 unique visitors on the jBPM.org website.

...and that in a holiday period. Nice. Keep clicking !

Everyone that knows what caused this increase in interest is wins a free jBPM 4 download :-)

Getting Started With jBPM 4.0

2009-07-14T10:39:00.004+02:00

A lot of getting started materials are already available. The release of jBPM 4 has not gone unnoticed.

Joram Barrez whats-new-series
jBPM4 Hello World
jBPM4: What’s new?
jBPM4: What’s new (part 2)?
jBPM4: What’s new (part 3)?

Joram also spotted and collected the following blog links. Thanks, Joram!

Jeff Yu published a great jBPM 4 intro in 3 parts:
Getting Started with jBPM 4.0 - (Part I )
Getting Started with jBPM 4.0 (Part II)
Getting Started with jBPM 4.0 (Part III)

Bernd Ruecker published a jBPM 4 showcase:
Ein kleiner jBPM 4 Showcase (In German)
English translation

Andries Inze published a demo on the Spring integration:
Spring jBPM4 CR1 Demo

jBPM 4.0 Is Out !

2009-07-10T17:06:00.005+02:00

jBPM 4 is ready. Now is an ideal time to try it out and increase your skills cause your boss is on holiday anyways. This is the opportunity you've been waiting for! Grab it!

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/jbpm/jbpm-4.0.zip

There is an extremely easy-to-set-up demo included. Step by step instructions to get started quickly.

jBPM 4 is a very important milestone for jBPM. We've put a lot of effort in lowering the treshold to get started and extending the scalability to the highest load scenarios.

Embeddablity in any Java environment remains as it was
Full continuous integration matrix in our own test labs
BPMN process graphics
Completely redesigned, clean and stable API, including an easy to use Query API.
Out-of-the box experience with a demo that is extremely easy to set up, showing the new designer, API usgae, console and example processes
Simplified and revised database schema
Automatic installation scripts
Performance improvements
Configuration on a more abstract level leaving less chances of getting it wrong.
Separation of runtime data and historical data
Native support for integrating with the Spring framework.
Improved documentation, including a separation between user guide for typical use cases and an developers guide tackling advanced topics.
And much much more

Workflow Engines: Build Your Own Vs Use An Existing

2009-06-24T09:14:00.005+02:00

Bernd Ruecker (Camunda, BPM Guide) posted a very interesting article about the choice between build a home grown workflow engine versus adopting an existing one.

Google translates it from german to english for you.

Original article in german.

jBPM 4.0.CR1 Released

2009-06-05T18:45:00.004+02:00

Even though it's not the season, we've added an easter egg. Who can find it ?

Don't forget to check out the new group activity in the developers guide. It's a worthy replacement for the obsolete super-state.

Get it from sourceforge and keep those issues coming.

Special thanks for this release goes out to Joram. He just started last week on the team and saved our lives on his first release by finding and fixing a showstopper issue on the day of the release. Kudo's Joram ! Keep it up.

Making A Callstack Persistable

2009-05-20T09:13:00.004+02:00

Another one of David Chappell's great workflow writings: The Workflow Way. In this article, David explains the essence of workflow and BPM engines. Typically, the BPM vendors try too much to link their engines to the business value of managing processes properly, thereby obscuring what BPM engines actually do from a software standpoint.

BPM engines are different from plain programs like Java, C, Cobol etc in 2 key aspects:

1) The runtime state is persistable. At any point during execution of a process, the process execution can be interrupted and stored. Later the execution state can be retrieved from persistent storage and continued.

This is essentially different from plain computer programs where the callstack is not persistable. Blocking plain programs keeps thread resources and that doesn't survive reboots of the computer system.

The capability of interrupting an execution, storing it, retrieving it and resuming the execution can also be described as support for wait states.

2) Graphical representation. The second aspect where BPM processes differ from plain programs in languages is that BPM processes are aimed to be represented graphically with boxes and arrows.

David's article is an easy to read article for understanding these two aspects in more detail and learn what BPM and workflow engines really are made for.

jBPM Community Day Slides

2009-05-14T18:07:00.004+02:00

Finally all the slides of the jBPM Community Day are online:

Sneak Preview of jBPM 4 at JAX conference

View more presentations from tombaeyens.

jBPM Community Day: Full Scale STP With jBPM

View more presentations from tombaeyens.

Presentation jBPM Community Day 2009 - First steps with jBPM4

View more presentations from jorambarrez.

Joram also publish a report on our community day.

jBPM Community Day Report

2009-05-12T20:53:00.010+02:00

Last week Friday, we had the second jBPM Community Day. With over 40 people again a well attended event. For those who missed it, here's an impression.

The first part of the day, the core developer met up to discuss the interesting low level tech details.

At 3pm, I kicked it off with an overview.

Then quickly people needed a break.

Then Eric Schabell, who joined JBoss just last week, introduced the talk about the SNS bank use case, where he worked before.

Maurice de Chateau from SNS Bank gave a good impression of how jBPM was used in practice. It turned out there sometime there are some practical problems between dream and reality.

Then Joram Barrez gave an awsome demo connecting jBPM with his cellphone over bluetooth to pay for a parking space.

Those who don't quit easily joined us for food.

And the die hards joined us for drinks :-)

jBPM 4.0.0.Beta2 Released

2009-05-12T14:42:00.002+02:00

Give this Beta2 release a try. Lot's of things were improved. Feedback appreciated.

JAX jBPM 4 Sneak Preview Slides

2009-04-22T10:45:00.002+02:00

I've posted the slides of my jBPM 4 Sneak Preview talk yesterday at the JAX conference. First part is the same as the BeJUG presentation from last month. But the second part contains some concrete new examples of how to use jBPM 4 and what it can do.

jBPM Case Studies

2009-04-09T16:29:00.003+02:00

Check out these case studies showing how jBPM is used in various industries like government, telecom, health care, biotech and as OEM. Thanks to the contributing companies: Enernoc, Advent conferencing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Crix International, SK Telecom, Vivat, Lexicon Genetics, Nuxeo and DST Health Solutions.

jBPM 4.0.0.Beta1 Released

2009-04-09T15:12:00.003+02:00

jBPM 4.0.0.Beta 1 is out. Go get it here. We've added task management capabilities like candidates and swimlanes. More details in our JIRA.

Spring and jBPM

2009-04-07T16:01:00.002+02:00

A session to look out for: "Spring integration in jBPM 4" by Andries Inze at next week's J-Spring event by NLJUG. The event is basically booked. But as people notify that their not coming, registration is activated again.

jBPM 4 sneak preview at JAX Conference

2009-04-02T12:01:00.003+02:00

I'll be presenting a jBPM 4 sneak preview at JAX 09, April 21st 10:00 - 11:15

Get ready for the next generation of software development. jBPM 4 will deliver BPM to the masses. This session will start by highlighting the typical pitfalls of BPM and workflow technologies. jBPM can plug straight into your application's architecture. Learn how developers can structure their code around a combination of domain model and business processes. A couple of example scenarios will show the powerful features of jBPM. Apart from the business use case, this presentation will also highlight jBPM's capability to covers a range of technical use cases like orchestrating asynchronous architectures.

jBPM Slides Of The BeJUG Event Yesterday

2009-03-20T09:42:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, I gave a jBPM 4 introduction for the BeJUG. The slides are available on slideshare. Check out the other BeJUG events, there are some real nice ones to come.

jBPM 4 BeJUG Event March 20 2009

View more presentations from tombaeyens.

Good jBPM Documentation Articles

2009-03-17T11:32:00.002+01:00

Just came across http://www.mastertheboss.com Fransesco Marchioni and Mark Spencer posted some nice jBPM articles. Especially the jBPM Best Practices article is worth a read.

Great work, guys!

BeJUG jBPM Event Now Thursday In Ghent

2009-03-16T10:00:00.003+01:00

Don't miss out on the next BeJUG event now thursday. Take this opportunity to connect with the core jBPM community developers!

Tuning jBPM In A Cluster

2009-03-11T11:55:00.003+01:00

Szymon Zeslawski has posted a great TSS article: Scalability and Performance of jBPM Workflow Engine in a JBoss Cluster.

The verdict is that jBPM is a very efficient workflow engine, it only requires turning the right knobs in order to get the most out of it.

That is indeed the spot that we're working hard to resolve in jBPM 4: better tuning defaults and that way try to postpone the need for custom tuning when scaling out.

By adding 3 servers and tweaking jBPM configuration, we were able to increase the throughput over 16 times in comparison to 1 server environment with default setup.

Awsome !

Next jBPM Community Day is May8th in Antwerp, Belgium

2009-03-10T13:27:00.002+01:00

It will be hard to match the Dublin jBPM Community Day from last year. But we sure are going to give it a good try an Antwerp. Mark May 8th in your calendar, start to book your flights and get some rest upfront.

More details in this wiki page

3 Approaches To Transform Analysis Diagrams Into Executable Processes

2008-10-30T10:40:00.005+01:00

Finally a good blog discussion related to the reason of existence for Business Process Management (BPM). It's about how analysis diagrams get transformed into executable processes.

Scott Francis' post Compliance for the BPMN Specification… Shooting the Moon? already gives real good comments on the recent blogs. That is what triggered me to put the approaches that I know of in a list.

When considering BPM as a management discipline, the goal is that the business people should be in control. So business people, which usually don't have a lot of software development skills, create diagrams to document how people and systems work together. These I'll refer to as analysis diagrams. In this context, BPMN is currently getting a lot of attention.

On the other hand, it might be decided that software support for these processes will be developed. In that context, an executable process is a piece of software that can be executed on a BPM System (BPMS) and which also has a graphical representation. The only real executable process language standard currently around is BPEL. But BPEL targets what I describe as a completely different use case, namely service orchestration.

That brings us to the obvious question of how are analysis diagrams different from executable processes and how to bridge between them. This is where *finally* an interesting debate is starting at the heart of BPM.

Here are the 3 approaches:

1) I'll start with our own approach, as of course, that is the best :-)

We believe that analysis diagrams can be created in many notations, BPMN being one of them. Then it is up to the IT department to select the best process language that fits with their needs and then produce an executable process that looks exactly like the analysis diagram. That way the diagram remains an excellent instrument in the communication between IT and business people. But as an executable process is actually software, it should te governed by the IT department. In a previous post about BPMN 2.0 I elaborate a bit more on how we see the collaboration between analysts and developers.

This approach is quite similar to those who claim that we should move to executable BPMN. BPMN 2.0 will most likely incorporate explicit execution semantics for all the diagram elements. I believe that this is a very pragmatic move by Oracle and IBM as they have BPEL products and pure-play BPM products in their portfolio. For the pure-play BPM products, the executable BPMN route basically puts the translation to an executable process under the hood and makes it therefor irrelevant. That way, the pure-play BPM vendors are not forced to use BPEL underneith as the mapping between BPMN and BPEL is basically broken.

But in our view, a naive adoption of making BPMN executable can easily lead to trouble. It's generally accepted that process diagrams need to be decorated with technical details before they can be executed on a BPMS. Most of thos technical details that do not translate to the business side.

But the same is true the other way round: be very careful with expressing too much business level details in the diagram as they might not translate to the executable process. So you want to keep those out of sight of the business analyst. In many cases a lot of those graphical notation bells and whistles are actually technical details. So if the naive way of making BPMN executable results into graphical programming, then it is not suited to support BPM as a management discipline. Business analysts should be able to model freely without being constrained by technical details.

So in conclusion, the primary focus of bridging between analysis diagrams and executable processes should revolve around just the basic boxes and arrows. That is the intersection that can facilitate communication between business and IT.

2) Another approach is roundtripping. As said above, most people have realized that this is basically broken... unless... You can develop so much tooling around it like Oracle or IBM. With a vast amount of tooling a BPMN diagram can be translated to an executable process in e.g. BPEL and then synchronization links can be maintained so that roundtripping becomes an option.

The downside of this is that the user actually has to maintain the synchronization links. A lot of effort will be spend by the developer team to feed in the synchronization information. And still the changes that are generated to the executable process when a business analyst updates the analysis diagram, will never be transparant. In most cases. the development team will still have to intervene and merge the changes and verify the interactions between the process and verify the correct operation of the process in the context of other related software components.

And IMO, some teams might spend the time to maintain 2 models and keep them synchronized, but in general, I think this is undermining a big part of the agility value of BPM.

3) The third approach I'll discuss here is expressed by Ismael Ghalimi in Why BPEL Matters.

In their approach comes down to mapping BPMN to BPEL. But he also adds that the resulting BPEL process should be considered as the bytecode.

In this approach there is a believe that an analyst diagram can be decorated with technical details to make it executable. I don't see yet how this can lead to anything else then graphical programming.

I'm really puzzled by this approach as it seems to me that it is taking the worst of two worlds. On the one hand, they create a hard link between the analysis diagram and the executable diagram which blocks the analyst from modeling freely. And secondly, why would you perform a clumsy translation to BPEL if it's kept under the hood? I could think of easier ways to execute BPMN natively then through a translation to BPEL.

If BPEL should remain under the hood, then I don't get why BPEL is so important? I agree with the standardization argument. But they are also building SimPEL, which he describes as a different syntax for BPEL.

Another point that I wish to challenge is that BPEL supports distributed transactions. Afaict, BPEL doesn't specify when the state of a process should be persisted and it doesn't state how that persistence should participate in a transaction, let alone how it should participate in a distributed transaction that spans multiple systems.

Let me know if I'm missing something.

3 BPM Blogs You Want To Subscribe To

2008-10-24T09:50:00.006+02:00

Here are some top notch blogs that I have *have* to recommend:

1) Leadership BPM by Rashid N. Khan

Last year, Rashid retired as the CEO of Ultimus and now he started a blog in which he shares his vast amount of experience.

During this period I was involved in 100s of BPM deployments worldwide and collected a wealth of experience. Now that I have retired from Ultimus, I want to leverage this expeience and help senior executives to learn about and benefit from BPM and related technologies. I have a unique perspective and I have been very focused on the practical, nuts-and-bolts issues about BPM that senior executives have to understand if they are going to fully realize the potential of BPM.

The nice thing is that he now can give an independent, unconstrained look on things. Opinions of that skill and which can speek freely are hard to find.

In What it will take to deliver BPM as SaaS?, he already seems to pinpoint the crucial conditions of the latest BPM as a service hype.

In my judgment BPM SaaS has to have the following characteristics as a minimum. First, it must have the ability to model and modify executable processes in a hosted application. The ability to design executable processes, in contrast to simple flow diagram, is pretty challenging. ... Second, BPM SaaS must have the ability to allow customers to integrate with their inside-the-firewall data and other applications. This is crucial because BPM deals with company’s data and interacts with other applications. Without effective integration only the very simplistic BPM processes are candidates for SaaS, and CxOs are reluctant to invest money or mindshare on simplistic processes. Integration is the Achille’s heel of BPM SaaS and solutions for this will evolve only gradually. Perhaps the best approach for BPM vendors is the emerging class of "application appliances" that leverage virtualization technology to deliver inside-the-firewall solutions on a SaaS basis. This has the potential of solving the integration problem. I will discuss it in another blog as this is a topic on its own. Third, and easiest, is the ability for end-users to participate in business processes using a browser. ... Fourth, BPM SaaS must provide a means for customers to monitor and administer their processes over the Internet. Again, with the emergence of AJAX and RIAs, this is not a challenging obstacle. And fifth, BPM SaaS must provide some web-based reporting, BI and BAM capabilities.

In Is the BPM Industry stuck in no-man’s land?, Rashid starts by pointing out that BPM systems didn't get to the mainstream as they always envisioned:

Even if I take a conservative forecast and assume that the market was $1 billion in 1998 and growing at 15% per annum, it should be at least $4 billion today. But the most recent forecast continue to put it in the $2 billion range. So where does all the growth fizzle away? Second, every BPM vendor and analyst can provide a number of actual case studies of BPM deployments that demonstrate remarkable ROI and productivity benefits. And it is relatively easy for senior management to understand why BPM can deliver such results. Yet the penetration of BPM in organizations is still small and I would venture to say that less than 10% of processes are automated despite all the ROI and productivity proof points. Third, every year BPM vendors claim impressive growth and publish a roster of new customers. Yet most pure-play BPM vendors are relatively small companies and none have been able to go public despite the claims of growth and the fact that many of them have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital.

This is exactly what I thought as well and in my opinion this is largely due to the fact that executable processes should be part of the software applications themselves. The big problem still to date is that BPM Systems are considered as monolithic applications that are hard to integrate into a software development project. That is exactly the problem that we have focussed on in jBPM since the very beginning. And indeed it is not an easy one. Rashid seems to come to a similar conclusion:

First, BPM sounds glamorous, but it is not easy. This is because human beings work in extremely complex ways. Developing software that caters to all these ways is not easy. The “human interface” of BPM is complex and challenging. Second, the IT environments in which BPM has to thrive are very complex, varied and in constant flux. BPM cannot be successful without seamless integration with the rest of the IT infrastructure.

I hope that Rashid keeps up sharing his points of view.

What's cool for me is that when I started jBPM, Ultimus is actually the first product I looked at to see what the competition was like.

2) Small steps with big feet by Joram Barrez

Joram is a BPM and jBPM guru that I had the opportunity to collaborate with on a few occasions. For all your jBPM performance concerns, make sure you read his blog or get him involved. He tweaked jBPM performance better then we did !

His latest blog Blogs about jBPM you don’t want to miss! provides links to a lot of interesting jBPM related posts that are very informative.

3) PlanetjBPM by Ronald van Kuijk (aka kukeltje)

Ronald provides great practical tips and tricks on jBPM. He's another BPM and jBPM guru calling himself rightfully the jBPM Forum Addict. In practice this means that he helped thousands of people getting started with jBPM over the last 5 years by answering basically every question on the jBPM user forum.

BPEL versus BPM

2008-10-23T10:00:00.002+02:00

Pierre Vigneras wrote a nice article on InfoQ about how BPEL is not the right solution for BPM. As you might know that is what I have been saying for a long time. Also the discussion that follows the article is quite interesting.