Red Hat Job Opening - Software Sustaining Engineer

We are looking to hire someone to help improve the quality of BRMS and BPM Suite platforms. These are the productised versions of the Drools and jBPM open source projects.

The role will involve improving our test coverage, diagnosis problems, creating reproducers for problems as well as helping fix them. You’ll also be responsible for helping to setup and maintain our continuous integration environment to help streamline the various aspects involved in getting timely high quality releases out.

So if you love Drools and jBPM, and want to help make them even better and even more robust - then this is the job for you :)

The role is remote, so you can be based almost anywhere.

URL to apply now http://jobs.redhat.com/jobs/descriptions/software-engineer-brno-jihomoravsky-kraj-czech-republic-job-1-4759718

Partner Workshops in Madrid and London in October

Red Hat is organizing two 3-day workshop for partners about various technologies, including JBoss BPM Suite, FSW and xPaas.  Both will take place in the next few weeks, one in Madrid and one in London, and I'll be attending both.

Important: this event is for Red Hat Channel Partners***, not end users or customers. 

Come spend three days with Red Hat experts and learn about JBoss BPM Suite, Fuse Service Works, and OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. This three-day master class will include product presentations, roadmaps, industrial use cases, panel discussions, and hands-on lab sessions, as well as the opportunity to talk one-on-one with the experts.

The speakers of the events are: middleware product leaders, principal architects and partner enablement experts. Many of them work as commiters in many open source communities. This is a great chance to meet the worldwide experts!

Madrid:  Tuesday, Oct 21 - Thursday Oct 23 2014

London: Monday, Oct 27 - Wednesday, Oct 29 2014

This is pretty last minute, but if you're interested and (would like to) qualify as Red Hat Partner, ask for an invitation from emea-partner-team@redhat.com

*** Red Hat Partners create an eco-system where they are building solutions or offering services based on existing Red Hat products.  For example, they might be delivering service projects or IT product as ISV partners, or delivering solutions based on Red Hat products as system integrators.  For more info, check out http://www.redhat.com/en/partners

jBPM 6.1.0.Final available

The bits have been out for a few weeks now (as we wanted to wait on the new website for the public announcement), but we are now glad to announce that jBPM 6.1 is available and you can find all information about it on our new website.

Some useful links:

Downloads

Documentation

Release Notes

Ready to give it a try but not sure how to start?  Take a look at the jbpm-installer chapter.

jBPM 6.1 comes with a ton of smaller improvements and bug fixes (done over the last few months on top of 6.0.1.Final), and also includes some important new features, adding to the foundation delivered as part of jBPM 6.0.

Embedding forms in external applications

Now you can embed and run process/task forms that live inside the Kie-Workbench just adding a JavaScript library to your webapps. Look at the Using forms on client applications section to see the full functionality and usage examples.

Attaching documents to forms

Added new file type to manage upload documents on forms and store them on process variables. Using the Pluggable Variable Persistence you'll be able to create your own Marshalling Strategy and store the document contents on different systems (Database, Alfresco, Google Docs...) or use the default implementation and store them in your File System.

Web Service (SOAP) interface for remote API

The execution server, that is part of the jbpm-console web tooling, now also comes with a Web Service interface (in addition to the existing REST, JMS and Java client interfaces).

Deployment descriptors

Deployment descriptors have been added as an optional, yet powerful way of configuring deployment units - kjars. Deployment descriptors allow to configure (among others)

• persistence unit names
• work item handlers
• event listeners (process, agenda, task)
• roles (for authorizarion - see section 1.5)

Deployment descriptors can be configured on various levels for enhanced flexibility to allow simple override functionality. Detailed definition of deployment descriptor can be found in the Deployment descriptors section.

Role-based authorization at runtime for process definitions and process instances

The process definition and process instance view in the jbpm console now also take the role-based access control restrictions into account that can be defined on the project the process is defined in. You can limit the visibility of a project (or repository as a whole) by associating some roles with it that are required to be able to see the project (or repository). This can be done when creating the repository, or bu using the command line interface to connect to the execution server. The deployment descriptor (see previous section) also allows you to further customize these roles at deployment time. At runtime, the views will check if the current logged in user has one of the necessary roles to be able to see that process. If not, the user will not see this process or process instance in the process definition or process instance list respectively.

jBPM installer updates

The installer is updated to support:

• Wildfly 8.1 as application server
• Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler 1.0.2
• Eclipse Kepler SR2

jBPM Spring integration

Spring integration has been improved to allow complete configuration of jBPM runtime using Spring XML. That essentially means there are number of factory beans provided as part of droolsjbpm-integration module that significanlty simplifies configuration of jBPM. Moreover it allows various configuration options such as:

• reply on JTA and entity manager factory
• rely on JTA and shared entity manager
• rely on local transactions and entity manager factory
• rely on local transactions and shared entity manager

Details about spring configuration can be found in this article.

Other

Smaller enhancements also include:

• Task service (query) improvements, significantly speeding up queries when you have a large numbers of tasks in the database.
• Various improvements to the asynchronous job executor so it can handle larger loads more easily and can be configured (number of parallel threads executing the jobs, retries, etc.).
• Ability to configure task administrator groups in a UserTask (similar to how you already could configure individual task administrators).
• Removed limitation on custom implementations of work item handler, event listeners that had to be placed on global classpath - usually in jbpm-console.war/WEB-INF/lib. With that custom classes can be added as maven dependencies into the project and will be registered on underlying components (ksession).

Data Modeler - round trip and source code preservation

Full round trip between Data modeler and Java source code is now supported. No matter where the Java code was generated (e.g. Eclipse, Data modeller), data modeler will only update the necessary code blocks to maintain the model updated.

 Standardization of the display of tabular data

We have standardized the display of tabular data with a new table widget.
The new table supports the following features:

• Selection of visible columns
• Resizable columns
• Moveable columns

jBPM6 Developer Guide

My twitter is exploding with references to this new book for a few days now, so I thought I'd share it with others as well: 

Mariano, Maurcio and Esteban have published a new version of their book a few weeks ago, jBPM6 Developer Guide.  Mariano gives some more information about what to expect from this book on his blog, including an overview of the chapters.

(click on the image to go to the Packt Publishing website)

While I haven't read the book myself yet, I consider Mariano, Mauricio and Esteban all experts in this area !

Interview with Jim Whitehurst on JBoss BPM Suite

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has given an interview related to BPM in general and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite more specifically in the run up to BPM Open House 2014.  Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite is the supported Business Process Management platform based on jBPM6.  For more information related to this, check out one of my earlier blogs.

In the interview, Jim talks about why Red Hat is interested in the BPM market, what open source means in this context, and a lot more.  You can listen to the podcast or read the text transcript.

Contributor dashboards coming

The dashboard-builder is used in the jBPM project to offer customizable reports regarding overall status of your processes (using predefined process reports integrated into the jBPM console), but can also be customized by users to define custom, domain-specific reports on whatever data you have available.

David has created a great video on how to use the dashbuilder for example to get insight in changes people are doing to git repositories, and published this video showing for example the activity on various jBPM-related source code repositories over the past few years:

Internally, the workbench is also using a git repository underneath to keep track of the various changes users are doing to their processes etc. in their projects.  jBPM 6.2 will include a similar page that can be used to get an overview of who is changing which repositories / projects and drill down into the details, a short video can be found here.

New activity pages can also be used to get an overview of recent changes.  Activity pages, that provides insight into projects.

The first Activity page captures events and publishes them as timelines, as a sort of social activities system - which was previous blogged in detail here. This allows events such as "new repository" or "file edited" to be captured, indexed and filtered to be displayed in custom user dashboards. It will come with a number of out of the box filters, but should be user extensible over time.

 (click to enlarge)

Early versions of both features should be ready to test drive in the up coming 6.2.0.Beta2 release, end of next week.

Get ready for jBPM 6.1 with a first release candidate

jBPM 6.1 comes with a ton of smaller improvements and bug fixes (done over the last few months on top of 6.0.1.Final), and also includes some important new features, adding to the foundation delivered as part of jBPM 6.0.

Now is the time to give some of these new features a try and let us know if you find some issues or have some recommendations!  6.1.0.Final will be released in the next couple of weeks.

Download here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jbpm/files/jBPM%206/jbpm-6.1.0.CR1/

Documentation here:

http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.1.0.CR1/userguide/

Getting started? Use jBPM installer:

http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.1.0.CR1/userguide/jBPMInstaller.html

From the release notes, here's a short overview of some of the changes:

Embedding forms in external applications

Now you can embed and run process/task forms in your own web application, that live inside the jBPM console, by just adding a JavaScript library to your webapps. Look at theUsing forms on client applications section in the documentation to see the full functionality and usage examples.

Attaching documents to forms

Added a new widget to forms to manage upload documents and store them on process variables. Using the Pluggable Variable Persistence you'll be able to create your own Marshalling Strategy and store the document contents on different systems (database, a content management system, ...) or use the default demo implementation and store them in your file system.

Web Service (SOAP) interface for remote AP

The execution server, that is part of the jbpm-console web tooling, now also comes with a Web Service interface (in addition to the existing REST, JMS and Java client interfaces).

Deployment descriptors

Deployment descriptors have been added as an optional, yet powerful way of configuring deployment units - kjars. Deployment descriptors allow to configure (among others)

• persistence unit names
• work item handlers
• event listeners (process, agenda, task)
• roles (for authorizarion - see section 1.5)

Deployment descriptors can be configured on various levels for enhanced flexibility to allow simple override functionality. Detailed definition of deployment descriptor can be found in section Deployment descriptors of the documentation.

Role-based authorization at runtime for process definitions and process instances

The process definition and process instance view in the jbpm console now also take the role-based access control restrictions into account that can be defined on the project the process is defined in. You can limit the visibility of a project (or repository as a whole) by associating some roles with it that are required to be able to see the project (or repository). This can be done when creating the repository, or bu using the command line interface to connect to the execution server. The deployment descriptor (see previous section) also allows you to further customize these roles at deployment time. At runtime, the views will check if the current logged in user has one of the necessary roles to be able to see that process. If not, the user will not see this process or process instance in the process definition or process instance list respectively.

jBPM installer updates

The installer is updated to support:

• Wildfly 8.1 as application server (note that CR1 still uses AS7 by default but more recently dashbuilder has also added support for WildFly so for the Final release we will switch to WildFly by default)
• Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler 1.0.2
• Eclipse Kepler SR2

jBPM Spring integration

Spring integration has been improved to allow complete configuration of jBPM runtime using Spring XML. That essentially means there are number of factory beans provided as part of droolsjbpm-integration module that significanlty simplifies configuration of jBPM. Moreover it allows various configuration options such as:

• reply on JTA and entity manager factory
• rely on JTA and shared entity manager
• rely on local transactions and entity manager factory
• rely on local transactions and shared entity manager

Details about spring configuration can be found in this article.

Data Modeler - round trip and source code preservation

Full round trip between Data modeler and Java source code is now supported. No matter where the Java code was generated (e.g. Eclipse, Data modeller), data modeler will only update the necessary code blocks to maintain the model updated.

Other

Smaller enhancements also include:

• Task service (query) improvements, significantly speeding up queries when you have a large numbers of tasks in the database.
• Various improvements to the asynchronous job executor so it can handle larger loads more easily and can be configured (number of parallel threads executing the jobs, retries, etc.).
• Ability to configure task administrator groups in a UserTask (similar to how you already could configure individual task administrators).
• Removed limitation on custom implementations of work item handler, event listeners that had to be placed on global classpath - usually in jbpm-console.war/WEB-INF/lib. With that custom classes can be added as maven dependencies into the project and will be registered on underlying components (ksession).

London Community Event (May 26th - 30th)

During next week a large percentage of the Drools team, some of the jBPM team and some community members will be meeting in London (Chiswick). There won’t be any presentations, we’ll just be in a room hacking, designing, exchanging ideas and planing. This is open to community members who wish to contribute towards Drools or jBPM, and want help with those contributions. This also includes people working on open source or academic projects that utilise Drools or jBPM. Email Mark (mproctor at codehaus d0t org) if you want to attend, our locations may very (but within chiswick) each day.

We will not be able to make the day time available to people looking for general Drools or jBPM guidance (unless you want to buy us all lunch ;)). But we will be organising evenings things (like bowling) and could make Wed or Thu evening open to people wanting general chats and advice. Email Mark if you’re interested, and after discussing with the team, we’ll let you know.

Those currently attending:
Mark Proctor (mon-fri) Group architect
Edson Tirelli (mon-fri) Drools backend, and project lead
Mario Fusco (mon-fri) Drools backend
Davide Sottara (wed-fri) Drools backend
Alex Porcelli (mon-fri) Drools UI
Michael Anstis (thu-fri) Drools UI
Kris Verlaenen (wed-thu) jBPM project lead
Mauricio Salatino (mon-fri) jBPM tasks and general UI
Jeremy Lindop (wed-thu) jBPM designer (new hire)

Deep Dive into jBPM6 video (Red Hat Summit 2014) available

The recording of my Red Hat Summit 2014 presentation and demo is now available.

It gives a quick introduction on jBPM6, a demo of the web-based tooling and then a deep dive in some of the details on the new jBPM execution server.

Enjoy !

Embedding process forms in your application

Pere has shared some details on a new feature he's working on for the jBPM 6.1 release, i.e. the ability to embed a form (to start a process or to complete a task) as part of your own application.

With jBPM6, a new form modeler allows you to graphically design your process and task forms (using a WYSIWYG style of editor, dragging an dropping text fields, labels, etc. to create your form).  These forms are then used in the jbpm-console to typically ask the end user for input (when you start a process or complete a task).

For example, this form was designed to allow users to request a mortgage by starting the mortgage process.

Pere is developing a simple REST service that will generate a URL that you can use to show the form (that you designed as part of the process) in an iframe in your own application as well.  It also includes a simple JavaScript API you can use to communicate with the form.

Keep an eye on his blog, as this is just part 1, more details to follow.  Feedback welcome.

Red Hat Summit Middleware Keynote and Demo

This year, JBoss BPM Suite 6 / jBPM6 was an important part of the middleware keynote once again !

 

Mark Little explained why the release of the JBoss BPM Suite 6 is an important step forward.

And later it was used as part of the keynote demo to drive requests (coming in from twitter), all running on openshift, set up on a bunch of laptops.

The full keynote video is available here, enjoy!

Come meet us at Red Hat Summit in SFO

This week, Red Hat Summit is taking place in San Francisco, and a lot of us (engineer, product management, solution architects, etc.) will be there at the Moscone Conference Center.  If you are attending Summit or DevNation (the developer-oriented conference co-located with Summit), feel free to come and see Mark Proctor's presentations on Drools / JBoss BRMS and/or my presentation on jBPM / JBoss BPM Suite.

There will be plenty of opportunities to meet us as well, like for example the DevNation hacknight on Wednesday, but should you want to meet up but can't find us, try reaching out to us on twitter, @markproctor or @KrisVerlaenen.

There will also be plenty of opportunity to go and watch one of the demos at the JBoss booth, and the Usability Team has set up booth as well where you can go and check out JBoss BPM Suite 6 and provide feedback, so definitely go take a look.

Hope to see you all there, hopping in my flight now !

Webinar (April 10th): Business Process Simulation

Get More Value out of BPM with BPSim Simulation

Thursday, April 10th, 11:00AM Eastern

Business process design with BPMN2 can be complex, with many feasible options for implementing a business strategy. How can process designers evaluate alternative approaches before committing to a costly rollout of an untried process design?

Recently, there have been great strides in new process simulation tools, intended to answer this question and help analysts optimize their process designs before any real data is available to test them against. The BPSim standard is now emerging to provide a common framework for defining and exchanging simulation data in conjunction with BPMN2 models.

Join BPM.com's Nathaniel Palmer with guest Kris Verlaenen to learn how BPSim compatible tools can help you understand how business process designs will perform in practice, and where to look to improve and optimize them.

As part of the presentation we will see a live demonstration of Red Hat's new process simulation tool, included with JBoss BPM Suite. Attendees will also receive access to the developer version of BPM Suite, and the exclusive demonstration models used in the presentation.

Why You Should Attend:

• Learn How to Use Business Process Simulation for Data-Driven Process Excellence
• Gain Both Actionable Ideas and a Complete Working BPM Suite with Process Simulation Capabilities
• Jumpstart Your BPM Programs With Pre-built and Ready-to-Run Simulation Models

Who Should Attend:

• Business Architects and BPM Practitioners Looking to Get Started with Process Simulation
• Business Analysts Seeking to Leverage BPM and Simulation for Data-Driven Process Optimization
• Anyone Looking to Get Started with BPM, BPMN2 Process Modeling, or Process Simulation

---

Nathaniel Palmer
CTO & VP, Business Process Management, Inc.

A best-selling author, practitioner, and rated as the #1 most influential thought leader in BPM by independent research, Nathaniel is co-author of a dozen books on innovation and knowledge work, including “Intelligent BPM” (FSI 2013), “How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done” (FSI 2012), “Social BPM” (Future Strategies), “Mastering the Unpredictable” (MK Press, 2008), “Excellence in Practice (FSI 2007), as well as the “Encyclopedia of Database Systems” (Springer Reference, 2007) and “The X-Economy” (Texere, 2001). Nathaniel has been the Chief Architect for projects involving investments of $200 Million or more, and frequently tops the lists of the most recognized names in his field. He was the first individual named as Laureate in Workflow.

---

Kris Verlaenen
jBPM Project Lead, Red Hat

Kris is the JBoss jBPM project lead and the lead technical architect behind the Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6. After finishing his Ph.D. in computer science in 2008, he joined JBoss. In 2010, he became the jBPM project lead. He also has a keen interest in the healthcare domain, one of the areas that has shown a great need for a flexible processes and advanced rule and event-processing integration.

Webinar JBoss BPM Suite 6.0 available on demand

The webinar we recently did on JBoss BPM Suite 6.0, including a 15-20min demo of the web tooling in action, is now available on demand.  Click the "Register Now" button below to register and you'll be able to view the entire webinar on demand.

Automate workflows now with a leading open source BPM platform

Looking to build powerful workflow automation solutions? Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.0, now generally available, brings Business Activity Monitoring and Business Process Management capabilities from the jBPM community project together in to a single, integrated product.

Join us in this webinar to learn:

• How to get started quickly with the fully integrated User Interface, Process Simulation and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools.
• The best use cases for running the process execution as a stand alone server vs. embedded mode. 
• How to seamlessly manage decision logic with business rules optimization
• What's coming next...

Speakers:

Prakash Aradhya, Product Management Director, JBoss BPM and BRMS Platforms, Red Hat
Prakash Aradhya is responsible for driving the product strategy and roadmap for JBoss Enterprise BRMS and BPM products. He has over 15 years of experience in product development and product management in the middleware software industry.

Dr Kris Verlaenen, Principal Software Engineer, Lead BPM Architect, Red Hat
Kris Verlaenen leads the jBPM Project effort and is also one of the core developers of the Drools project, to which he started contributing in 2006. After finishing his PhD in Computer Science in 2008, he joined JBoss full-time and became the Drools Flow lead. He has a keen interest in the healthcare domain, one of the areas that have already shown to have a great need for a unified process, rule and event processing framework. 

Red Hat announces JBoss BPM Suite 6 (based on jBPM6)

Last week, Red Hat announced the general availability of JBoss BPM Suite 6. 

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite is the JBoss platform for Business Process Management (BPM). It enables enterprise business and IT users to document, simulate, manage, automate and monitor business processes and policies. It is designed to empower business and IT users to collaborate more effectively, so business applications can be changed more easily and quickly.

As a result, you can now get official support for developing and deploying your jBPM6 applications.

More details can be found on the JBoss BPM Suite product pages.

It might be important to know that JBoss BPM Suite 6 is a super-set of JBoss BRMS 6, so you automatically get the a solution integrating business processes with business rules, complex event processing and business resource planner.

You can download a 90-day evaluation version from Red Hat Customer Portal (under Evaluations & Demos).

Furthermore, this is just the first step towards offering bpmPaaS, where these services can be made available on a (private or public) cloud like for example Red Hat OpenShift.

A webinar with more detail and Q&A is available on request.