Monday, April 16, 2012

JBoss Community Recognition Awards

This year, Mariano De Mayo has been nominated for the JBoss Community Recognition Awards, in the category New Features, for all the hard work he put into creating the new graphical form builder for jBPM:
Mariano De Maio - jBPM
Mariano De Maio has contributed a new graphical form builder component to the jBPM project. Mariano works for OSDE, the largest healthcare organization in Argentina, and they are using jBPM and Drools in this context and enabled Mariano to work on this full time for about a year. Task forms are necessary in the jBPM project whenever human actors participate in a business process and need to perform certain tasks and possibly fill in related results. Mariano developed a new web-based editor that allows non-technical users to define these task forms using a graphical editor where you can drag-and-drop building blocks (label, text fields, tables, dates, images, etc.) onto a task form. He added support for automatic form generation, input validation, triggers, loading form data from various sources, previews, and much more. This new component is now integrated with the other jBPM components, so business users can define these forms alongside their process definitions in Guvnor, and see these forms show up when performing their tasks at runtime in the jBPM console. The form builder is delivered as one of the mayor new features in the jBPM 5.3 release and we would like to thank Mariano for his significant contribution. To get an idea of the capabilities of the form builder, please take a look at some screencast of the form builder in action at http://vimeo.com/marianbuenosayres/videos

I'd like to ask everyone to help us so we can give him the credit he deserves and go to the JBoss Community Recognition Awards page, log in with your jboss.org community account and give him a vote :) Hurry, there's only a few more days left (until April 18, 5:00 p.m. ET)!

Thursday, April 12, 2012

jBPM Designer version 2.1 released

We are happy to announce that we have released version 2.1 of the jBPM Designer. This is a big release which solves many issues we had in 2.0 as well as adds lots of new features. We are especially happy that jBPM Designer will also be included in the up-coming JBoss BRMS 5.3 release.

Here is a summary of what’s new and noteworthy in Designer 2.1 and we have also included a video below. Try it out and let us know what you think!

New and noteworthy

  • Numerous bug fixes. The number of commits for bug-fixes alone was over 100 between 2.0 and 2.1.
  • Increased performance for user interactions with the UI as well as loading time (JavaScript is now served compressed)
  • New features: Support for Reusable Subprocesses (Call Activities), Multiple Instance Subprocesses, and Data Objects
  • New feature: Support for Stencil set Perspectives. Allows you to specify a specific superset or a subset of supported BPMN2 nodes grouped in a named stencil set
  • New feature: New data input editors. We added specific user-friendly editors for Process variables, Globals, Imports, Task Data Inputs/Outputs/Assignments, Called Elements, etc
  • New Feature: Process dictionary support. Allows you to define your own process dictionary and use it inside your business processes.
  • New Feature: In-Line editing of Process and User Task forms. This new feature allows you to create/modify your process and task forms in-line which is great as you do not have to leave your modelling environment to perform this feature.
  • New Feature: Code highlighting and Code completion in Expression editors, code highlighting for process and task form editors and source views.
  • New Feature: Smart node deletion – deleting a node will also delete its incoming and outgoing connections unless they specify an expression
  • Support for both Drools Guvnor 5.3 and 5.4

Here is also a video for the Designer 2.1 release.
Yes, Tiho went a little crazy on his video editing skills, we know ;)

You can download this version from soureforge just like the previous ones. Simply replace your existing designer war with the new one. Make sure to clear our your browser cache before starting to use the new version.

As always your feedback is more than welcome. Hit us up on IRC if you would like to contribute to the jBPM Designer. Have fun!