jBPM 4.0.CR1 Released

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

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

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

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

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

JAX jBPM 4 Sneak Preview Slides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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