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.
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.
Mauricio and Esteban have been working hard on their latest book on jBPM and today, their jBPM5 Developer Guide has been released !
I believe Mauricio and Esteban have done a good job in including a lot of valuable information for people with different backgrounds. They start with an introduction to BPM in general, give an overview of how to model processes using the BPMN 2.0 standard, show how to do all of this with jBPM and then go even further by showing more complex examples that for example include business rule integration, etc.
You can get both as a eBook or printed (which includes a free eBook as well) from Packt Publishing here.
I'm even able to offer you some discount codes, 20% off for the printed version and 25% off for the eBook. I think that's a very nice gesture of Packt Publishing, showing once more they try to support open-source with benefits like this. Note that they have a limited validity for use till 1st Feb, 2013.
In order to apply the codes, you will need to:
- Visit the Packt website and log in to your account (non-registered
users will be required to create an account first)
- Open the book-page
and add the book to cart
- On the cart check-out page, enter code
in the Enter promotional code box and then Update
cart
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 !
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 !
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.
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!
