Google Summer of Code: Students apply now!

JBoss is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program, which means that students can work on their favourite open-source project during the summer and get ultimate glory and a nice paycheck in return.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that gives university students a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for future employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

JBoss has created a list of possible ideas you can take a look at, but you can always propose us your own ideas as well !

For jBPM, I've added two ideas to the list, but there is a Wiki page with over 10 possible proposals available here, including:

• jBPM on android
• Integrating jBPM with your own preferred project(s)
• jBPM performance on steroids
• Document management system
• Mobile client(s) for jBPM
• From BPEL to BPMN2
• Social BPM using jBPM
• Implement human tasks as a business process itself
• Process mining for jBPM
• jBPM and Drools for access control
• jBPM and Drools for clinical decision support

The deadline for student applications is April 6th, 19:00 UTC, so if you're interested in participating this year, don't hesitate and be fast !

JAX 2012, April 16-20th, Germany

I'll be giving a presentation on the JAX conference this year in Germany. I'll be giving an overview of not just business processes, but also business rules and complex event processing, and how they all come together in the JBoss BRMS / BPMS product. So if you're already planning to go to that conference, make sure to add it to your time planner and I hope to see you there :)

Business Processes, Business Rules, Complex Event Processing with JBoss

Kris Verlaenen Red Hat

17.04.2012 | 11:45 - 12:45 Uhr

JBoss's Business Rules Management System, BRMS, integrates various community projects such as Drools and jBPM bringing together a unique combination of business processes, business rules and complex event processing, unavailable elsewhere in the industry. Delivered in a single open source distribution and accessible from a common set of authoring tools, with JBoss BRMS customers can combine business processes, business rules and event processing in support of a broad range of decision management and process driven applications. This session explores the use cases for the BRMS, the benefits for the customer, and we will walk through many of the new features now available to enterprise developers. The discussion will center around the many powerful solutions that can be built leveraging rules, complex events, business process automation and the combination of the three. A special focus will be on the new BPM features that are coming with the integration of jBPM5 / BPMN2.0 into version 5.3 of BRMS.

Maciej, welcome to the jBPM team

I'd like you all to welcome Maciej Swiderski to the jBPM team. Maciej lives in Poland and joins us from IBM research, where he was working on the Tivoli software. He started contributing to the jBPM project several years ago, and recently realized that BPM is actually his passion. We welcome him with open arms, and his experience with different BPM systems will definitely be useful in the future.



Welcome Maciej !

Get ready for jBPM Web Designer 2.1 !

Tihomir did a nice blog about the upcoming 2.1 release of the jBPM Web Designer. This version will include awesome new features and numerous bug fixes - read all about it here!

Reward system demo

In the webinar I did last week, I showed a demo that creates a simple reward system where employees can give rewards to each other (that then need to be approved by HR).

The demo shows how to create a new application from scratch using a clean setup (using the latest jBPM installer) where a business user and a developer work together to create the business process. We then generate the necessary JUnit tests and task forms for this process, deploy it to the Guvnor repository and execute it on the jBPM console.

The demo is now available as six small screencasts.

In the first video, a business user uses the web-based Designer (that is integrated into the Guvnor repository) to create a rough, first version of the process.

• The business user defines that first someone from HR should approve (or reject) the request
• The process should then send an approval email to they employee if the request was approved.
• The developer can then import this process into his Eclipse workspace.

The second video shows how the developer edits this process and adds all the necessary details to make it fully executable.

The third video shows how a JUnit test can be generated from the process definition to test the process.

• The developer generates a JUnit test for the process (see last part of the second video)
• He then fills in some of the data that needs to be passed to the process
• The test executes successfully

The fourth video shows how forms (a process form to start the process and a task form to approve requests) are generated from the process definition and customized a little.

The fifth video uploads all these files onto the Guvnor repository and builds them so they can be used in production.

Finally, the process is executed in the jBPM console, where we start a new approval process and let someone from HR reject it.

You should be able to reproduce this yourself completely, simply by following the steps in the video. Hope you all like it !

Recording of jBPM webinar available

The recording from the jBPM 5 webinar I did last week is available. It gives a quick introduction to jBPM, includes a short demo that includes most of the tools available, highlights some of the most important features in the latest release and gives information on the project and product roadmap. So if you missed the webinar, go ahead and take a look.

Use the following links for either playback or download.

The demo in the webinar was based on a set of screencasts that I created (unfortunately I had a disk crash 15min before the presentation so I couldn't do a live demo), and I will make these screencasts available in a separate blog as well. This will allow you to see the full videos at your own pace.