JBug London - December 12

Mauricio and Esteban are doing a presentation on jBPM and the book they wrote about it on a London JBug in December 12!

While the first part will mostly focus on the core BPM features, the second part will also show some of the more advanced integration with business rules and complex event processing.

So if you're in London on December 12th, and looking for an interesting presentation or talk afterwards about jBPM, or just looking for a place to eat some pizza and drink some beer ;), register now !

There's even a chance to win a copy of the new book already !

jBPM 5.4 released !

We are proud to announce the release of jBPM 5.4.0.Final.  

The bits were ready more than a week ago already (and looking at the download statistics quite a few of you already found them ;)), but a busy travel schedule made it difficult to complete the work and announce everything.  But here it is !

Downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jbpm/files/jBPM%205/jbpm-5.4.0.Final/

Documentation:

http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v5.4/userguide/
API and JavaDocs:

http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v5.4/javadocs/

The jBPM installer is probably the best way to get started.  Download the full installer and follow the documentation here to walk through some of the most important components.

So what's new?

Simulation

We've added simulation capabilities to the web-based process designer, that allows you to simulate how a process might behave at runtime.  This includes the addition of various simulation-related properties (like resources and duration-related attributes for tasks, and probabilities for diverging gateways etc.).  Our implementation is based on the specification created by the BPSWG (Business Process Simulation Working Group).

Based on these properties, you can run a number of instances of your process and:

• Use the path finder to look at all identified paths
• Look at the generated charts containing information about minimal, maximum and average completion times, etc. using (horizontal and vertical barcharts, pie charts or tables.
• Check the timeline to get an overview of all the recorded events

Maciej did a blog recently on the ideas and concepts behind it, and Tihomir did a blog, including a 12-minute video, that shows simulation in action.

Local task service

When human actors participate in a business process (also known as human workflow), a task service is used to manage the life cycle of the tasks (claiming, completing, task lists, etc.).  While we supported the use of a centralized task service (using HornetQ for remoting), we now also support a local version that runs as a simple Java component next to the engine and all the work it does is synchronous and nicely integrated with the transaction of the process engine.

org.jbpm.task.service.TaskService taskService = 
    new org.jbpm.task.service.TaskService(
        emf, SystemEventListenerFactory.getSystemEventListener());
LocalTaskService localTaskService = new LocalTaskService(taskService);
LocalHTWorkItemHandler humanTaskHandler = new LocalHTWorkItemHandler(
    localTaskService, ksession, OnErrorAction.RETHROW);
humanTaskHandler.connect();
ksession.getWorkItemManager().registerWorkItemHandler(
    "Human Task", humanTaskHandler);

Spring 

We have improved our Spring support, where you can use a Spring configuration file to configure your environment and inject a ksession and/or task service into your application code.  For transactions, it integrates with the Spring transaction manager, supporting both JTA and RESOURCE_LOCAL with shared entity manager factory (emf) or shared entity manager (em).

JPA2

jBPM runtime persistence can now also use JPA2 for persistence.  That means it is completely independent of the underlying persistence provider (we use Hibernate by default but other persistence providers should be possible as well).  You can use Hibernate4 with JPA2 for even better performance.  For all the details on how to do this, here's a link to a persistence configuration file for both JPA1 and JPA2.

Some of the other features

• Improvements on some of the BPMN 2.0 constructs in the core engine, related to error events, terminating end events in sub processes,
   
• Introduction of a business calendar related to timers etc.
  
• The ability to start a process by name, which will automatically start the latest version of that process.
  
• We created separate wars for EE6 (AS7) and EE5 (AS5) to avoid a lot of manual dependency management.  JBoss AS 7.1.1 is now the new default application server in the installer.
  
• Improved support for invoking web services from inside your processes.
• A database-backed solution for managing which users are part of which group (UserGroupCallback).
• When configuring handlers for domain-specific services, the ksession is automatically injected as an optional constructor parameter in the handler configuration file.

The details on all fixed issues and new features can be found in detail in JIRA.

jBPM 5.4.0.Final has been released in sync with the latest Drools 5.5.0.Final release.

If you have any questions / issues, let us know:

• Ask questions on IRC: chat.freenode.net:6667 #jbpm (there is a web-based client available here)
• Create a JIRA issue: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBPM 
• Ask the community in the forum

The jBPM team

JBUGs Sydney & Melbourne 19th & 20th November 2012

I'm visiting Australia next week, and I'll be giving two JBUG presentations:

• in Sydney on Monday November 19th
• in Melbourne on Tuesday November 20th

I'll give a quick jBPM overview and focus on some of the new features that we're developing and some of the changes you'll see in the near future.

Important: Followed by pizza and drinks after each session ! :)

So if you're in the vicinity, feel free to join us.  Registration is necessary.

Hope to see you there !

Integration and BPM week, Oct. 15-18

Join us for Red Hat Integration and BPM Week virtual event on October 15-18, 2012.

There you will learn about Red Hat's integration and BPM road map, find out how recent acquisitions will be integrated into the portfolio, and gain practical knowledge from the engineering leaders that are driving the most popular integration, messaging and rules, and BPM technologies and standards.

One registration grants access to all 17 information-packed webinar sessions!

Sessions include:

• Fuse IDE makes integration easy – James Strachan (formerly FuseSource)
• Getting Started with Apache Camel – Claus Ibsen (formerly FuseSource)
• Enterprise integration at scale – Keith Babo
• Business rules and event modeling made easy – Edson Tirelli
• Simplify the complexity of your business processes – Kris Verlaenen
• ActiveMQ in the cloud – Dejan Bosanac
• Fuse Fabric and Fuse Management Console – Stan Lewis (formerly FuseSource)

The virtual event is FREE. Sessions will be delivered live, and will also be available on-demand afterwards. One registration gets you access to everything!

For more information on the agenda and sessions, please go to: www.redhat.com/promo/jboss_integration_week

IntelliFest conference with Drools & jBPM bootcamp

In 4 weeks, the IntelliFest 2012 conference will take place in San Diego (starting Monday October 22nd).  IntelliFest is the successor of RulesFest and as always brings a mix of presentations, both for managers and developers, and bootcamps to get the practical experience.  

As part of that, there will also be a FREE Drools & jBPM bootcamp and a healthcare day.  Tihomir will take care of the jBPM presentations there, giving an overview of jBPM, BPMN2 and human tasks.

Program Overview:
Monday - Healthcare focus for Rules, Workflow, Ontologies and Events (Free)
Tuesday - General Drools&jBPM session (Free)
Wed - Fri - General IntelliFest Sessions

There are limited spaces, so register soon here.

Monday - Healthcare focus for Rules, Workflow, Ontologies and Events (free)

0830-0920 Captain Emory Fry, MD
Socratic Grid : Open Source Distributed Decision Support for Healthcare

0930-1020  Dr Robert Greenes, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University
Key Note : Embedding Decision Support in Clinical Systems

1030-1120 Dr Aziz Boxwala, Division of Biomedical Informatics, University of California
Clinical Decision Support Consortium

1130-1200 Dr Seong Ki Mun, President and CEO of OSEHRA
Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent 

1200:1300 Lunch

1300-1350  Dr Davide Sottara, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University
Knowledge Representation Standards For Building Executable Clinical Processes Models

1400-1450 David Shields, Health ITS, University of Utah
OpenCDS: a Clinical Decision Support Infrastructure Based on Drools

1500-1520 Harold Solbring, Division of Biomedical Informatics, Mayo Clinic
Semantic Wiki

1530-1655 Conor Dowling, Caregraf
Semantic Terminology Services

1600-1620 Dr Xiao Hu, Department of Neurosurgery, University of California
Clinical Decision Support Driven Alarms

1630-1700
Panel Discussion - Collaboration Opportunities

Tuesday - General Drools&jBPM Workshop (free)

 

8.00 AM: Breakfast Social – pre-laptop setup, and QA time with solution Architects. 
-Key will be provided to setup your laptop, so you can view and run the examples used during the talks.

9.00 BRMS Product Overview (Prakash Aradhya 15min) 
How we turn the Drools and jBPM communtiy parts into a world class product. Supporting and harvesting all the innovation done in the open community, Red Hat delivers reliable, dependable and integrated solutions for enterprise customers.

9.15 Introduction to Drools Expert (Mark Proctor 45min) 
Drools Expert covers the business rule engine. A gentle, example driven, dive into the Drools technical rule language and engine features.

10.10 Introduction to Drools Fusion (Edson Tirelli 45min) 
Learn how Drools does CEP differently. Our unified approach extends Drools Expert with a series of language and sub-engine extensions to provide temporal reasoning and event correlation.

11.05 Introduction to jBPM and BPMN2 (Tihomir Surdilovic 45min) 
jBPM is a BPM engine designed for flexible processes, implementing and extending the BPMN2 spec. Built form the ground up to be part of a unified strategy for business automation and decision management. jBPM fully integrates with Drools Expert and Fusion.

11.45 Decision Modelling with Graphical Editors (Edson Tirelli 30min) 
Drools Expert provides sophisticated web based tooling, around decision tables, guided editors and templates. Our decision modelling approach draws from the very best research found at Dr Jan Vanthienien school of Decision Modelling.

12.30 Working Lunch – Experience Drools and jBPM – Hands on labs (Optional) (1hour)

13.30 Human Tasks up Close and Personal (Tihomir Surdilovic 40min) 
Human tasks are a central component of BPM. This example driven talk will build an example live, demonstrating what jBPM’s Human Task technology can do for you.

14.20 Building Games with Drools – Pong, Snake and Wumpus (Mark Proctor 40min) 
Time for some hard play, learn how to build classic computer games with Drools. These also provide interesting exercises in BA requirements gathering.

15.10 Drools Planner a Quick Overview (Geoffrey De Smet 40min) 
Whether it’s employee rostering, task scheduling, vehicle routing, bin packing or another planning problem: all organizations try to optimize their limited resources under constraints. Drools Planner optimizes business resources for normal Java programmers.

15.50 Drools Chance for Imperfect Reasoning (Davide Sottara 40min) 
Sometimes data quality is not perfect, so facts may not be known with precision and certainty. Likewise, crisp constraints such as hard thresholds might not be able to capture the complexity of a business policy. Drools Chance allows to apply gradual and/or probabilistic constraints to uncertain or vague data.

16.40 UberFire – Drools&jBPM Workbench framework (Mark Proctor 30min) 
UberFire is a new project that forms the foundation of our 6.0 web tooling. It’s standalone framework that provides a sophisticated workbench framework for the web; where everything is a plugin. Come learn about the Uberfire, and how you can use the workbench to build your own web applications.

17.10 Drools&jBPM 6.0 and Beyond (Optional : open as long as people remain) 
An open presentation and discussion about the design ideas, principles and goals that are driving the development of Drools & jBPM version 6.0. This will be an optional and informal session where attendees will have the opportunity to learn about what is coming, contribute ideas and provide feedback that will be taken in consideration by the development team.

17.10 Hands on Lab 
Run at the same time as "Drools&jBPM and Beyond" and Beyond. Solution Architects are on hand to help you with your coding problems, and running examples.

Red Hat Acquires BPM Technology from Polymita

Yesterday it was announced that Red Hat acquires BPM technology from Polymita.

The deal accelerates Red Hat’s entry into the BPM software segment and augments its JBoss Enterprise Middleware integration software offerings.

“The ability to change rapidly is an absolute necessity for businesses in today’s enterprise environment. Organizations that do not empower their business users to quickly and effectively modify automated business processes forfeit the ability to remain agile, competitive and relevant,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of middleware at Red Hat. “Polymita’s technology enhances Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio and specifically complements JBoss Enterprise BRMS and jBPM.”

Polymita is a Barcelona, Spain-based start-up that created a comprehensive BPM platform and was positioned as a Visionary in latest BPMS Magic Quadrant.

We're very happy they joined the JBoss family and are looking forward to join forces behind a singular vision, bringing our BPM offering to the next level even faster now!

A FAQ section already provides some answers, but more details on the how and what will be shared as soon as possible.

jBPM: What did I miss last 2 weeks?

I've been on vacation for a few weeks (was able to escape the Belgian weather and enjoy some France "joie de vivre"), and this time I decided to really leave work behind while on vacation.  That means I'll probably be catching up on email for about a week or so, but the rest of the team hasn't been slacking, so what did I miss?

• Tihomir has been experimenting with voice-driven BPM in the Designer, where you can use voice commands to create your processes.  This is still our first, experimental attempt at including something like this during the modelling phase, but I definitely believe this will be useful for some of you (although I don't think everyone will all of a sudden start talking to their laptop ;)).  Click on the link above to see a screencast of it in action.
   
• Mauricio has written a series of blog entries on how processes and rules (or rules and processes) integrate (part1, part2 and part3).  It starts with some examples on how processes and rules can be combined, and then goes into detail on how most BPM systems do it, and some of the more advanced features that are available in jBPM to do more advanced integration as well.

• Maciej did a blog post about his presentation at JUDCon Boston this year on what he calls jBPM enterprise, which tries to improve the integration into Java EE environments.  It bundles jBPM and Drools into JBoss Modules and uses OSGi and maven archetypes to create a web application on top.

• Mauricio describes the current state of the jBPM form builder in this blog post, where he explains how you can use the form builder without depending on guvnor and how you can integrate forms in your own web application.  Click on the link above to see the associated video.

• Finally, Tihomir describes how task form editing can be done inline in the web designer, so while modelling your process, using a simple HTML template editor (with features like code completion and live preview) and customizable form widgets.  Also includes a screencast of it in action, including a process form for use on mobile.  Next is integration of the form builder as an option there too.

I should go on vacation more often it seems ;)