Barcelona JUG: Drools & jBPM workshop

Salaboy is back again with some great news! They are planning a meeting in Barcelona to show the new tooling provided by Drools & jBPM 6. The event will be hosted by BarcelonaJUG as they did last year but this year we are aiming to do a more workshop oriented event, where you can attend with your laptop and play with the tooling. The main goal of the workshops is for you to have the tooling installed and working in your own environment. We will also be giving some guidelines about how to contribute with the community projects, so if you are interested in being part of these amazing communities this is a very good opportunity to get you started.

The event

The location of the event will be in "La Fontana" (The fountain):

Carrer Gran de Gràcia, 19008012 Barcelona

On the 10th of December we will be starting at 6:30 pm, but feel free to be there before that time because I'm sure that we will be setting up the place at least an hour earlier.

It will be good if you show up with your laptop, because we will be trying to showing in your own environment how the tools work. A couple of days before the meet up I will be sharing some links that you will be able to download and pre install if you want to, to save some time on the event for more important and advanced questions. Another important thing that you can bring to the event is your 3G dongle if you have one. We are not 100% sure about the internet connectivity of the venue, but for some of the demos internet connection will be required, so be prepared to share some bandwidth.

That's all for now, stay tuned!

Don't hesitate to drop a comment if there is something in particular that you want to see on the event.

PS: the event will be in Spanish, but if you are from abroad and want to attend we will do our best to share as much as we can with you.

El Evento (Spanish)

Nos estaremos reunion en "La Fontana" ( en el centro de Barcelona. La dirección del evento sera:

Carrer Gran de Gràcia, 19008012 Barcelona

El 10 de Diciembre 2013 estaremos comenzando a las 6:30 pm, pero siéntanse libres de llegar un poco antes ya que estaremos preparando el lugar como mínimo una hora antes de empezar.

La idea principal del evento es poder compartir con ustedes las novedades de los proyectos comunitarios Drools y jBPM y al mismo tiempo que ustedes se lleven instaladas las herramientas provistas por estos proyectos en sus laptops. En los días previos al evento voy a estar compartiendo algunos links con las herramientas para descargar e instalar. Con esto ahorraremos algo de tiempo para entrar mas en detalle durante la charla y no perder el tiempo instalando la herramienta o copiando archivos, así que visiten el blog o ponganse en contacto si no reciben los mismos.

Aparte de sus laptops seria importante si pueden conseguir Dongles 3G para tener conectividad a internet durante el evento, ya que algunas demos requieren conectarse a servidores remotos para bajar ejemplos. En el caso de tener un Dongle 3G por favor llevenlos al evento y estén dispuestos a compartir conectividad con el resto de los participantes.

Eso es todo por ahora! No duden en dejar un comentario sobre sus intereses personales sobre el evento. Siempre es bueno saber cuales son las expectativas de la audiencia.

PD: el evento sera en español.

jBPM6 Showcase: jBPM Console - Hiring Process

Salaboy has written a blog about the new jBPM Console in jBPM6.  He uses the "Hiring Process" (which is package out-of-the-box as one of the examples in the jbpm-playground repository) as an example and takes you modelling, deploying and executing the process. 

Since the process contains a few user tasks, it also shows how end users can use the task list to see their tasks and use task forms to provide the necessary input.

Hire a new Developer

You can find the full blog here.

Webinar: Getting started with business activity monitoring (October 24th)

The upcoming Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6 will include new business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities. Join our webinar to learn how analysts and process owners can increase efficiency with better monitoring of the processes, tasks, orders, and more that make a business run.

During the session, we will discuss:

• How business analysts can build rich interactive business dashboards by configuration
• How end users can work with the reports created.
• Product architecture and connectivity.

Speakers:
Pedro Zapata Fernandez, engineering manager, Red Hat
Pedro Zapata joined Red hat in 2012 with the acquisition of Polymita. He has 12 years of experience in enterprise software, working as product manager for Polymita's BPMS platform for the last 7 years.

Luis I. Cortes, senior manager of product marketing, Red Hat
Luis has 12 years of experience in enterprise software. He joined Red Hat in 2012 with the acquisition of Polymita, which he co-founded, leading and growing the company as vice president of marketing and sales. He is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship and the impact that both have on organizations, society, and our lives as individuals.



Join the live event:Time zone converter

• Thursday, October 24, 2013 | 15:00 UTC | 11 a.m. (New York) / 5 p.m. (Paris) / 8:30 p.m. (Mumbai)

Free jBPM6 workshop in London, 23rd and 24th of October

I would like to invite everyone to a couple of developer-oriented workshops about the tools in the newest Drools and jBPM releases (6 series). The main idea of these workshops is to introduce developers to the new set of features and tooling provided by the projects.

Michael Anstis and Mauricio Salatino (Salaboy) will be showing how to configure and set up your working environment to work, customize and contribute to these projects.

We will be trying to cover the following topics:

• General Overview about the tools
• Distributions and Modules
• Technology Stack
• How to setup your working environment
• How to extend/customize the tooling

They actually released a teaser example as well, a process used to manage requirements in a sprint:



If you are brave enough and want to know the low level technical details of the tooling, please bring your laptop and be prepared to download the code and compile it in your own environment. We will assist you in the process and give you all the pointers to fix issues or provide new features.

Michael will be in charge of the Drools Side of the platform and Salaboy will be in charge of the BPM side of the tooling. If you are planning to start using these tools, we encourage you to attend to see the new features and get a high level overview about all the new things that are coming with the new version.

The place and the coffee will be sponsored by Plug Tree and the workshops will take place on the 23rd and 24th of October at No. 1 Poultry, London, EC2R 8JR From 3pm to 5pm+.   

Seats are very limited, and because the workshops are for free you will need to get in touch with us (salaboy at redhat dot com) if you are planning to attend. We will probably send you details of what you need to download before coming to the workshop so as not to depend on the local internet connection.

jBPM empowers Magnolia CMS

Maciej reported in his blog that Magnolia CMS uses jBPM 5 as their default work flow engine in version 5.

Just two weeks ago I had a pleasure to talk about jBPM (both v5 and v6) at Magnolia conference in Basel, Switzerland. This was a great event that I recommend everyone that is interested in CMS.

Together with Espen from Magnolia team, we made a really nice presentation about both jBPM and Magnolia Workflow that utilizes jBPM.

Here you can find the presentation:

jBPM6 Showcase: web-based jBPM console

This blog is part of a series showcasing jBPM6.  The goal of this blog is to introduce the jBPM console.

The jBPM console, our web-based management console (where you can start new process instances, complete your task list, etc.) has been redesigned completely.  There is now one web application supporting you through the entire life cycle of your business processes (and possibly other artefacts like your data models, forms, business rules, etc.).

 

 

The life cycle starts by authoring your business processes and deploying them.  You can also manage your process running process instances (or start new ones) and manage your task list.  Finally, dashboards can give you an overview of the entire system, where you can drill down into the details whenever necessary.

 

The following screencast gives you a quick overview of how to get started and run your first process.  Click on the image below to watch the screencast.

 

 

 

If you have used the jBPM installer to set up and start your environment on your local file system (see jBPM6 Showcase: getting started with the jBPM installer), you can try the same yourself! Simply navigate to http://localhost:8080/jbpm-console and log in using krisv/krisv.  This screencast uses one of the sample projects that are provided out-of-the-box as part of the jBPM playground repository (a repository that contains various sample projects that is automatically installed locally by the jBPM installer for you to play with). 

 

It uses a simple Evaluation process where a user can start a performance evaluation, where he first needs to perform a self-evaluation (which will show up as a task on his task list), after which his project manager and his human resource manager need to perform a similar evaluation.

 

The tooling is based on UberFire, which provides a configurable and pluggable web-based workspace.

What to do if I encounter problems or have questions?

 

You can always contact the jBPM community for assistance:

• IRC channel #jbpm at chat.freenode.net (you can use http://webchat.freenode.net)
• jBPM User Forum
• JIRA for bugs and feature requests

jBPM6 Showcase: getting started with the jBPM installer

This blog is part of a series showcasing jBPM6.  The goal of this blog is to help you downloading, installing and running the jbpm-installer, which will help you installing a demo setup (including the core engine, the web console, the eclipse tooling, etc.) on your local machine.

 

Step1: Download the installer

 

First of all, you need to download the installer. There are two versions, a full installer (which already contains a lot of the dependencies that are necessary during the installation) and a minimal installer (which only contains the installer and will download all dependencies). In general, it is probably best to download the full installer: jBPM-{version}-installer-full.zip

 

Step 2: Installation

 

The installer creates a demo setup, which includes the core engine, the web console (deployed on JBoss AS7), the eclipse tooling, etc.  It also contains a small example that you can use to run through each of the components.

Note: This install script assumes you have Java JDK 1.6+ (set as JAVA_HOME), and Apache Ant 1.7+ installed. If you don't, use the following links to download and install Java and/or Apache Ant.

The easiest way to get started is to simply run the installation script to install the entire demo setup.  Open a command prompt, go into the install folder where you unzipped the installer and run the following command:

 

ant install.demo

 

This will:

• Install JBoss AS7
• Download Eclipse
• Install jbpm-console war into AS
• Install the Drools & jBPM Eclipse plugin
• Install the Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler

 

When you run the installer for the first time, this could take some time (we are downloading an Eclipse installation specifically for your OS), so go and grab a cup of coffee now ;)

Note: The install script also allows you to use JBoss EAP 6.1 instead of  JBoss AS7, install the Eclipse plugins into an existing Eclipse installation, change the persistence configuration or authentication and authorization, etc. but that is outside the scope of this showcase.

Step 3: Starting up

Once the demo setup has finished, you can start playing with the various components by starting the demo setup:

ant start.demo

 

This will:

• Start the H2 database (which is used by default for storing all runtime information)
• Start the AS
• Start Eclipse

 

If everything went smoothly, your Eclipse application should have started up, and you should be able to open the web console by opening your web browser and navigating to:

http://localhost:8080/jbpm-console

Note that it could take a minute to start up the AS and web application.  If the web page doesn't show up after a while, make sure you don't have a firewall blocking that port, or another application already using the port 8080.  You can always take a look at the server log jbpm-installer/jboss-as-7.1.1.Final/standalone/log/server.log

In one of my next showcase blogs, I'll show you how to get started with the web application and Eclipse tooling.

 

If you also want to try out the dashboard builder (a monitoring web application to visualizate, customize and/or create various dashboards, reports and charts), with some default charts for monitoring your process instances, now execute (which will deploy the application so you can access it through the links in the jbpm-console):

 

ant install.dashboard.into.jboss

 

When you're done playing, simply close the Eclipse application, and run the following command to shut down the AS and H2 database:

 

ant stop.demo

 

What to do if I encounter problems or have questions?

 

You can always contact the jBPM community for assistance:

• IRC channel #jbpm at chat.freenode.net (you can use http://webchat.freenode.net)
• jBPM User Forum
• JIRA for bugs and feature requests

jBPM 6.0.0.CR2 available

We just put out our second release candidate for the jBPM 6.0 release.  All the components are feature complete and we're working on solving the last remaining issues.  So now is a good time to check out what's coming and give feedback on some of the new features or issues you may encounter.

 

You can download the (full) installer from the download pages or get the artefacts from the JBoss Maven repo.

 

The getting started documentation should help you running the installer and starting your first process in the jBPM web console and/or Eclipse tools.

 

To highlight some of the new features and components, I'll start doing regular blogs showcasing a particular component, feature, example, etc. in the next few weeks!

 

 

Like for example:

• getting started with the jbpm-installer
• web-based jBPM console (for managing process instances and tasks)
• the improved jbpm-designer (for modeling and simulating your business processes)
• the graphical form modeler (for creating human task and process forms)
• the data modeler (for creating data models)
• the Guvnor workbench (for building and deploying)
• the dashboard builder (for monitoring, dashboards and charts)
• the remote apis (REST, JMS, Java client)
• the updated Eclipse plugins

 In case you have any questions or feedback, you can contact us through the usual channels (irc, forum, JIRA, etc.).

Vote for JBoss Community Recognition Awards !

Voting for the JBoss Community Recognition Awards is now open !

Each year, we ask the JBoss project leads to nominate contributors that they feel have make significant and leading contributions to the JBoss.org Community over the past year. It’s that time again, and those nominations are now complete - so let the voting begin!

We have added a new category this year, “Community Leadership,” so the categories are now:

• Community Leadership
• New features
• Bug fixes
• Issue/JIRA
• Wiki
• Documentation

Several key jBPM community contributors were nominated this year, so your help on giving them the recognition they deserve would really be appreciated !

So please go and vote now !

I would personally like to thank everyone that contributed (in one way or the other) in the last year already.  You all deserve an award ! :-) 

• Bug Fixes:
  
  
• Esteban Aliverti - Esteban has shown tireless commitment to improving the overall quality of the project. From testing edge scenarios to fixing high profile bugs, no part of the code is out of his reach: fixing bugs from the core engine to the web tooling, Esteban has left his mark and helped improve the code for the benefit of the whole community.

•  Community Leadership
  
• Demian Calcaprina - Demian is a very active jBPM Community Member, as he's helping on the forums, reporting issues, etc.  He is also very active testing new releases and reporting back with suggestions and improvements.
  
  He was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012, where he worked on extending the jBPM human task service with a pluggable life cycle (which a task goes through, from creation through claiming and starting all the way through completing, etc.) using a business process, executed by jBPM core engine. 
  
  Demian is currently working as a Software Engineer at Viridian, but he is also offering freelance consulting services on Drools and jBPM.
     

•  New Features
  
• Mariano de Maio - Mariano is a very active community member who is always helping both in the community channels and on his own blog: http://marianbuenosayres.wordpress.com
  
  He is a Drools & jBPM Consultant who has contributed with the Infinispan and Drools integration and with the jBPM Form Builder. He has also reported and helped fix several bugs in the Drools and jBPM source code, providing comprehensive test suites. Mariano is now helping with the development of several components of the new jBPM Console NG.
  
• Saiful Omar - Saiful has been promoting and using jBPM in his academic research, which focuses on Process Adaptation and Compliance. He has published various papers where he describes an adaptive compliance workflow management system built on top of jBPM. 
  
  Saiful has been contributing to the jBPM Designer (i.e. a web-based process designer) with important features like:
  
  (1) Locking and Unlocking feature - this feature allows users of jBPM Designer to lock certain parts of the business process model in order to foster collaboration during the modelling phase of BPM. Locked parts of the model could be seen as ""feature complete"" and unlocked onces are what needs to be finished. Locked nodes can easily be unlocked as well if needed.
  
  (2) Microsoft Academic Search Service Node - the first community contributed jBPM service node definition and implementation. It allows users to easily add the Microsoft Search feature into their business processes. This contribution has been added to the jBPM community service node repository.

Drools & jBPM Walk in center @ Red Hat Summit (free and open for everyone)

There's a FREE opportunity if you are in the Boston area next week on Thursday.  A lot of us will be there for JUDCon and Red Hat Summit and we want to give you the opportunity to come and ask questions.

We have a dedicated room for community members to come and chat. The room should be open to all, not just those with Summit passes, although you'll need to tell security where you are going.  So whether you're already coming to Summit, or in the vicinity and want to join us, don't hesitate.

Day: Thursday, June 13th, 2013
Location: Boston, Hynes Convention Centre, Hynes Room 110

Time: 09.30 to 17.00

There will be chairs and tables, so you can spend as long as you like.  Mark Proctor, Edson Tirelli, Pedro Zapata and myself will be there all day, with probably other people dropping in as well.  No question too small, no task too big :) We can help you getting everything installed, give some mentoring on your current projects, or help you dive deep into Drools or jBPM code.

Feel free to drop in with quick questions on how to do something, or to check you're doing it right, or generic questions about Drools & jBPM itself, about the roadmap, etc.  There will be chairs and tables, so you can stay longer and hang out and code :)

Preparing for JUDCon + Red Hat Summit in Boston

A yearly visit to Boston has become a tradition it seems, I'll be attending the JUDCon Boston 2013 and the Red Hat Summit 2013 events next week !

JUDCon is the conference by and for developers, and it's an ideal place to get an overview of what's to come in the various projects, have a chat with the core developers or just grab some beers and have some fun ;)

I'll be presenting "What's new in jBPM6" on Tuesday ...

Business Process Management (BPM) is changing, and so is the jBPM project! It's no longer a tool used by developers to implement some low-level business logic, but it has evolved to a service offered to business analysts, developers and even end users to model, manage and monitor their business processes.
jBPM6 has a lot improvements in this area, and in this session we would like to take you through the most important ones. We will demonstrate the new web-based user interface, but also dive deeper into some technical improvements (like for example how we've simplified session and task service management, how to build your processes and how to scale your application).

... but do check out the agenda for a lot more interesting talks !

Red Hat Summit is the yearly Red Hat conference, to showcase the latest and greatest in cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage, and systems management technologies.  There's a huge amount of sessions, in a very large spectrum of topics.

I'll be presenting "" on Friday, together with Pedro Zapata ...

Business environments are complex. To run an efficient and effective organization in today’s world, business users need to be able to clearly analyze and understand business activities, model repeatable processes, and have clear visibility into process executions. And to be able to effectively interface with the system, business users need convenient tools. JBoss jBPM 6, a JBoss Community project, is set in that direction, built with sophisticated tools to empower business users.
In this session, Kris Verlaenen and Pedro Zapata Fernandez will discuss the state of these tools in JBoss jBPM and discuss the Polymita tools that are now part of jBPM 6. They will also demonstrate the:

• Improved process modeling, covering process design, form design, and data modeling
• New dashboard builder used to create rich KPI reports and graphs
• Redesigned task management and process monitoring interface
• New process analysis and simulation tools

 ... but there are a lot more BPM-related sessions and workshops to enjoy !

It's not too late to register, so don't miss this opportunity !  I hope to see you all there and discuss whatever is on your mind.

Car Insurance Policy Quote demo

The Red Hat UK SA team has been working at a demonstration that shows how different Red Hat projects can be brought together to form one big solution.  As part of this, they created a demo that shows a Car Insurance Policy Quote process:

It asks the user for input (driver information and car information and does various calculations in between to calculate the policy risk and price, using a decision table.  It is using JBoss BRMS 5.3.1 (which includes support for jBPM5) on top of EAP6.

Derek created a small video showing this in action as well:

The sources can be found here. Eric Schabell also extracted the policy quote process and packaged it inside his demo framework here.

Enjoy!

jBPM 6.0 Beta2 available

For developers that want to have a sneak peak at what's coming in jBPM 6.0, we've just released jBPM 6.0.0.Beta2.  We've added several large improvements:

• jbpm-console, our web-based management console (where you can start new process instances, complete your task list, etc.) has been redesigned completely


• new task UI

• new process instance management UI
  
  
  
• one web application that combines the entire life cycle (process modeling, deployment, execution and monitoring) into one web application
  
• based on UberFire, which provides a configurable and pluggable workspace

• RuntimeManager allows you to easily get access to a ksession and/or task service without needing to worry about how to create the session, where to find it, how to link it to the task service, etc.  There are predefined strategies for:
• singleton: one singleton session is used to execute all requests
• session per request: a new session is used for each request (and destroyed afterwards)
• session per process instance: each process instance has its own session context, all commands for that process instance are automatically executed in that context
  
  
• jbpm-services: core engine exposed as a service that can be deployed in a clustered environment, with lots of smaller improvements as well:
• timer service that will be able to handle timers in a clustered environment and automatically restore the appropriate sessions if timers need to be fired
• instead of using the process instance id as the unique identifier of one specific process instance, you can also correlate with your own business key now
• history logging has been extended to log additional information and an asychronous logger (using JMS) is available as well
• all services are exposed using CDI
• ! Note that remoting capabilities using REST / JMS are currently not available yet in Beta2 but will be available soon

• The Guvnor repository has been refactored:
• The repository back-end is implemented using a Virtual File System (VFS) with a git back-end as the default implementation.  This allows you to connect to your repository taking advantage of all the features that GIT provides out-of-the-box.
• The repository now uses maven to build all the processes, rules, models, forms etc. in your projects and produces kjars (knowledge jars).  These kjars can be treated as normal maven dependencies in your projects and the repository exposes itself as a maven repository as well.

• A Dashboard web application can be used to monitor your system and generate meaningful reports.  Some default reports are available out-of-the-box (showing information about running process instances, outstanding tasks, etc.), but the tool can also be used to combine those with your own business datam create your own KPIs and customized reports.
  


• Improved exception handling when performing service tasks, where the process that requested the service could be notified using a combination of techniques, including boundary events, event sub-processes, intermediate events, etc.
  
• The new Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler replaced the old BPMN2 editor and has been extended to support a lot more constructs.  Designer has been updated accordingly as well.

• Designer now supports the BPSim 1.0 specification for simulating your processes.

You can download the installer from here and follow the installer documentation and screencasts (below) to get your first processes running, both in Eclipse (for developers and in the web (for business analysts or even end users as well).

Note that this is a beta release, so unfortunately, most of the documentation is still missing, and there probably are some rough edges and/or bugs in there.  But do give it a try and let us know, so we can try to still improve these.

Google Summer of Code 2013

JBoss is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2013 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 offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. We have worked with the open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the upcoming summer.

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, we'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
• Process mining for jBPM
• jBPM and Drools for access control
• jBPM and Drools for clinical decision support

The deadline for student applications is May 3rd, 19:00 UTC, so if you're interested but didn't submit anything yet, you'll need to be fast!

BPSim and jBPM

jBPM has been an early adopter, supporter, and implementer of the Business Process Simulation Interchange Standard (BPSim). We believe that BPSim (which is a WfMC standard) will create a wide adoption of business process simulation in the BPM community, and are very happy to be part of that effort.

With the BPSim version 1.0 recently released, we have updated our jBPM core engine, simulation engine (which is based on the core engine) and our web-based tooling (jBPM Designer) to this latest version of the specification.

If you are interested in learning more about BPSim and jBPM or just have any questions feel free to talk to us on our IRC channels.

Here is the link to the jBPM Designer business process simulation capabilities that Tihomir posted before. We are adding new features and usability enhancements to it that should be out soon, so stay tuned.

SOA Governance workflow in S-RAMP

Governance (of all your artefacts) in a SOA environment is critical, and the Overlord project is an umbrella project that aims to bring governance to the JBoss SOA Platform and beyond.

The S-RAMP project is one of those puzzle pieces.  It is a SOA repository, based on the "SOA Repository Artifact Model and Protocol" (S-RAMP) TC for storing and managing SOA artefacts.

The 0.1.1 release of the S-RAMP project adds governance workflow capabities, where they use a BPMN2 process and jBPM to define and execute the business logic related to governing these artefacts.

They included a demo of all of this in action, so if you're interested, go check it out!