Red Hat Process Automation Manager v7.0

jBPM is completely open-source and therefore most of my blogs are typically about the latest and greatest feature that was just introduced in the community.  However, Red Hat also offers a supported version, with the testing, certification, and maintenance releases necessary for enterprise production use (for a quick intro on potential differences, take for example a look here).

And recently, as announced in this press release, Red Hat unveiled Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7.  The most obvious change you might notice immediately is that the product was renamed - formerly known as Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite.  Since jBPM has evolved beyond just BPM - with features such as decision management, case management and constraint solving closely integrated - it was time to also reflect that in the product naming.  Similarly, Red Hat Decision Manager 7 was released a few months ago, focusing on the Drools and Optaplanner bits.

However, nothing changes structurally.  Red Hat Process Automation Manager is based on jBPM (to be more precise, it was based on the jBPM 7.7.0.Final release) and actually is a super-set of Red Hat Decision Manager, so it also includes all the rules and constraint solving capabilities as well (Drools and Optaplanner).  Since it is completely open-source, you will see the same set of components there as you see in the community: the process execution server (kie-server), the web-based console (business-central aka the workbench - for both authoring and runtime deployment and administration), smart router, controller, Eclipse tooling, etc.  OpenShift images and templates (supporting these capabilities in the cloud) are available too for those targeting cloud deployment.

Red Hat Process Automation Manager also includes an advanced open source user experience platform from Red Hat partner Entando. It can be used to quickly develop modern UI/UX layers for user interaction with business process applications, including a drag & drop UI development tool with widgets to create task lists, forms, process graphs, etc.

Red Hat Process Automation Manager is part of the Business Automation portfolio, which includes Red Hat Process Automation Manager and Red Hat Decision Manager, but also the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and in the future also big data analytics through Daikon.

More questions?  Take a look at the product pages !

Maciej Swiderski is the new jBPM community lead

I am very glad to be able to announce that Maciej (aka "Magic") Swiderski will officially become the new jBPM community lead.

Maciej is one of the most productive engineers I have ever known.  And while that has led to huge expectations whenever he starts working on something new, he somehow manages to constantly over-deliver anyway.  To be fair, I have to say "officially" as he's been doing the bulk of that work for a long time.  Everyone that ever interacted in the community no doubt knows him, and his blog might be even more famous, probably almost any customer question is answered in one of the numerous blogs he has written over the last few years.  I remember exchanging emails with him in 2010, the early days of jBPM 5, but he was even active in the community before that.  He joined full-time a few years later, and ever since has taken care of anything related to process execution for years.  Nowadays, he's involved in so much (from case management to our cloud story) and producing so much work that I saw no other solution than to just make him responsible for it ;-)

Well deserved, and long overdue !  Congratulations Maciej.

PS: I'm not going anywhere in case anyone is wondering, still 100% involved, but given Maciej's continuous focus on the community and with the team growing this is the right move !