Standalone BPM Is Dead

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

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

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

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:

• JDD Poland: Pimp up your Domain model with jBPM
• Devoxx 09: jBPM 4 In Action (registration required)
  
• http://www.slideshare.net/tombaeyens

Learning jBPM Is Good For Your Salary

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

Camunda Publishes Insightful BPMN PraxisHandbuch

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

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

Blending Processes And Rules With jBPM

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

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

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

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

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

jBPM Hot Stuff

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

jBPM 4.3 Includes BPMN 2.0

Happy newyear! 2010 is going to be the year that BPMN 2.0 will get red hot and make its breakthrough. The BPMN 2.0 specification will be finalized this year and we target for our implementation to be ready around summer time.

We just released jBPM 4.3. This release includes the first part of our BPMN 2.0 language implementation. Check out the online docs http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v4/devguide/html_single/#bpmn2


More details about BPMN on Joram's blog.

Highlights for the jBPM 4.3 release:

• 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

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

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:

1. Craftsmanship and Policy - Robert C. Martin
2. The JavaPosse Live (First free talk)
   
3. JDK7 Update and Java SE 7 - Mark Reinhold
4. Enterprising JavaFX - Richard Bair & Jasper Potts
5. Turning labors of love into day jobs - James Gosling
6. Project Lombok - Roel Spilker & Reinier Zwitserloot
7. Project Coin - Joseph D. Darcy
8. jBPM4 in Action - Tom Baeyens & Joram Barrez
9. Do we really know how to develop software?- Ivar Jacobson
10. 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

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

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

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

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.