FOSDEM'12

This weekend is FOSDEM'12 (February 4-5th), the biggest FREE conference, in Brussels (Belgium) and Marco will be giving a presentation + demo on jBPM (focusing on the web-designer mostly). So if you don't have anything to do already this weekend (yes, it is during the weekend, so no excuses you need to be at work ;)), or if you're at FOSDEM already, go and check it out !

From his blog:

FOSDEM is the “Free and Open Source Software Developers Meeting” and it’s happening this weekend in Brussels. It’s a fairly large conference (5000-10000 attendees) covering all sorts of free software.

And I’ve been working on a presentation for it about jBPM Designer this week. Putting a presentation together can sometimes be more work than you expect — hmm, maybe more work than I expected then, at the least.

Here, good readers, is a link to a description of the presentation. Geoffrey De Smet, another core Drools/jBPM developer, is doing the first half the presentation on Guvnor, which Designer integrates into. You can find his blog post about it here. He’s also the lead developer on the Drools Planner project which I like. “You should check it out” are the words that you just read and that you already knew were coming.

A good friend of mine who’s somewhat of an expert in learning told me that all presentations and trainings should attempt to pose one question to the viewers and answer it. In this presentation, my question is

How do we let business analysts to do their work well (so that they leave the business software developers alone)?

It’s a question which I have at times found very pertinent, even though I have worked with some very good business analysts.

Designer is a great little web project that already is a polished, easily usable web application and integral part of Guvnor (from the jBPM standpoint) — and it’s getting better every day. In short, Tihomir (Surdilovic), who’s probably done most of the work on the project, has added lots of little nice features that make it easy to develop a (BPMN 2.0) process. The Guvnor integration means that, as Tiho put it, Guvnor becomes a “one-stop shop” for developing, storing and deploying processes.

You can just open up Guvnor (in a browser), create a new process, edit it, save it, build the package and then go directly to jbpm-console and BAM!, start your process. That’s kinda nice.. !

In my presentation, I’ll go over the background of BPM, BPMN and JBPM (if you’re attending, please practice saying that 10 times quickly), some of the main features of Designer, and then give a quick (max 10 minute?) demo. We might finish a few minutes early — depending on questions.