Thursday, June 30, 2011

SwitchYard integration is coming

For those who might not be familiar,
SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications.

You mean like an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? Yeah, kind of. At it's core, SwitchYard provides an embeddable services runtime with limited dependencies, allowing you to deploy and run services where you need them. The main difference between SwitchYard and traditional ESB offerings is that we are trying to make the runtime a transparent detail in the service lifecycle. SwitchYard aims to keep you focused on your services by providing tooling to help define, test, and manage the important details of a service - it's contract, policies, configuration, composition, and management . After all, the least important detail of your service is where it runs.
Good news, as this next-generation ESB will already offer jBPM integration in its 0.2 release, where SwitchYard services can easily be invoked from inside a jBPM process, as a domain-specific service.

For more information, check out the Wiki document and the associated example about the SwitchYard BPM component.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

jBPM 5.1.0 released!

We're proud to announce the release of jBPM 5.1.0.
jBPM is a flexible open-source Business Process Management (BPM) Suite. The core of jBPM is a light-weight, extensible workflow engine written in pure Java that allows you to execute business processes using the latest BPMN 2.0 specification. It can run in any Java environment, embedded in your application or as a service. On top of that, it supports a lot of tooling to support the business process through its entire life cycle, both for developers and business users. This includes an Eclipse plugin, web-based Designer, repository, management console, etc.
You can download everything here.

jBPM 5.1 includes a lot of small bug fixes and feature enhancements based on the feedback we received from the community (for jBPM 5.0). Most important improvements include:
  • The web-based Designer has been extended significantly to support all BPMN 2.0 constructs and to allow full round-tripping between the Eclipse-based and the web-based editor. It also supports domain-specific nodes now, can be embedded, etc.

  • A new jbpm-examples module contains a large number of example processes to show features like human tasks (including data passing and task forms), looping, multiple instances, rule-based integration, etc. I will describe some of these examples in more detail in some additional blog entries in the next few days.

  • Improved testing and debugging capabilities so you can easily JUnit-test your processes.

  • The documentation has been refactored, updated and extended. There's a new Overview and Getting Started chapter, and much more. And we'll continue this work in the next few weeks as well, so you can expect more details soon.

  • The new BPMN 2.0 Eclipse plugin has made significant steps forward as well. The goal of this new editor is to support the full BPMN 2.0 specification . It's still work in progress but it can already be used to create executable BPMN2 processes and execute them on jBPM5. We'll be working hard to improve the usability in the next few months.

  • Smaller feature enhancements, like
    • Automatic synchronization of processes in the jbpm-console when new proceses are deployed on the Guvnor repository
    • Simplified data passing to and from human tasks (and forms)
    • Extended BPMN2 engine with support for repeating timers
    • Support for multi-threading
A full overview of everything that was included can be found in the jBPM JIRA.



jBPM 5.1.0 is synchronized with Drools 5.2.0, which also has just been released. If you want to know more, take a look here.

I'd like to thank everyone that contributed to this release! This includes not just the core developers obviously, but everyone in the community that contributed in one way or another, from testing, improving documentation, creating examples, bug reporting to submitting patches and feature contributions!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

JBoss OneDayEvent Munich, October 13th

I'll be speaking about jBPM5 at the JBoss OneDayEvent in Munich on October 13th, 2011.
As the successor of the successful JBoss OneDayTalk 2010 conference, the JBoss User Group Munich e.V. will organize a full day JBoss conference in Munich again. On 13.10.2011, everything will once again revolve around JBoss technologies and Java frameworks, with the focus on current topics such as Enterprise in the Cloud, Security, Operations, High Availability, Scalability, ESB, Web 2.0, Mobile, Clustering, and BPM / BPEL / BRM content.
There will be a lot of interesting presentations about a ton of different JBoss technologies, given by core developers themselves. So this is the ideal opportunity to get all these technical details you're looking for and asking those hard questions! Or just to meet and greet the people behind the projects.

For a full agenda and more details:
http://onedaytalk.org/

Hope to see you there! And if you're quick, you can still take advantage of the early bird discount.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Argentine Workshop Update

An update on the Argentina June Workshop!

Most of the core developers of the jBPM and Drools team have been trying desperately to get to Buenos Aires. But the volcano in Chile has made that very difficult.

I'm back home, never got any further than Madrid, so they put me on a flight back home instead after two days of hotel and no immediate opportunity to still go the Buenos Aires. I'll do my jBPM5 presentation remotely and will try to be available as much as possible (man, this is Eyjafjallajokull all over again).

But it seems like the volcano issues are dying out. As a result of all this delay though, the Thursday workshop day will unfortunately have to be cancelled. But Friday is confirmed, so the workshop will take place! We'll just have to rearrange the content a little into one day again. And this will give everyone the opportunity to reach Buenos Aires in time as well.

But you can't argue with nature! So enjoy the trip and the workshop, from what I've heard it's worth it ;)

Friday, June 3, 2011

jBPM & Drools workshop coming to Argentina

Thanks to OSDE we now have a 2 day workshop planned in Argentina, Buenos Aires, half June, with nearly all the core Drools and jBPM developers. A MUST attend event for any developer in South America.

We are just finalising locations, agendas and speakers, we'll give more firm details later, but initially the line up is as follows:

Where: Argentina (Buenos Aries)
Date: 16-17 June (Thu/Fri)

Speakers:
Mark Proctor - Group Lead and Drools co-founder
Kris Verlaenen - jBPM Lead
Edson Tirelli - Drools tech Lead
Geoffrey De Smet - Planner Lead
Michael Anstis - Business Tooling tech lead
Ray Ploski - Solutions Architect

Guest Speakers (so far)
Salatino Mauricio (Plugtree)

While us core developers will be focusing on Drools and jBPM, Ray will be there to do talks on AS7, Seam and Infinispan.

You can now register for this event here:
http://droolsba.eventbrite.com

Hurry limited spaces!!!