jBPM Interest Peaks

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

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 !

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

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

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.