Friday, May 25, 2012

jBPM presentations and workshops (June 2012)

There will be several jBPM related presentations next month, so now is your chance to come and listen, meet the team and ask all your difficult questions ;)

  • First of all, I'll be doing a presentation on jBPM on JBossWorld, the large JBoss / Red Hat conference in Boston, June 26th - 29th, featuring talks about probably all JBoss projects.  So don't miss it, and feel free to jump in for my presentation.  There are tons of other interesting presentations as well, some of them might touch on jBPM as well, like for example how to combine processes and rules.
    We're also meeting with the jBPM and Drools team on the last day of the conference for a true codeathon, so bring your laptop and join us.
  • Before JBossWorld, there is going to be another JUDCon (June 25th - 26th) in Boston as well, targeted towards (and by) developers that really want to get to know the details of how everything works.  We have three jBPM presentations in the Rules, Workflow, SOA track on the second day (by Tihomir, Maciej and myself).
  • I can already share that we'll also have two jBPM and Drools workshops the week before that, one in New York and one in Washington, like last year.  Details will be shared soon, but these will give you a unique opportunity to get a day long training (presentations + workshop exercises) from the core team itself.
Hope to see you on one of those occasions.

Monday, May 21, 2012

jBPM 5.3 released !

jBPM 5.3 has just been released.  It includes a large amount of smaller improvements and fixes, and also contains a few new bigger features as well:
  • We would like to introduce our new Eclipse editor for defining business process in Eclipse (using the BPMN 2.0 standard).  This editor will offer support for the full BPMN2 specification, and currently offers support for at least the same constructs as the previous plugin.  We will continue to extend it over time with all the other constructs the jBPM core engine already supports, but we would like to hear your feedback as well !


  • A first version of the form builder has been released as well.  This form builder allows you to create and edit your forms (for tasks and processes) in a graphical way, using drag and drop.  It supports the usual components like labels, text fields and areas, buttons, etc. but already has support for various layouts, scripting, building your own components, etc.  [Note: this first version is currently only supported on FireFox but we're working on adding support for all other browsers as well]


  • The web designer received a lot of love as well, with new features like user-friendly property editors, color themes, a dictionary, inline form editing, etc.

  • The jbpm-human-task module has been split up in a jbpm-human-task-core module and sub-modules for the different transport protocols available (hornetq, mina, jms), and a separate war that can be deployed in the application server (and is made easily configurable now).  The installer now uses the war (with HornetQ) by default.
  • Integration between the jBPM console and Guvnor has been upgraded, to support new packages being added in Guvnor, removal of processes, etc.
  • The human task module now supports escalations and notifications.
  • Lots of persistence improvements to better support different databases, and we're using a new serialization technology (Protobuf) to better support upgrading / migration in the future.

You can download the release here (if you're not sure what you're looking for, downloading the full installer and then following the installer chapter to set up your environment and run through the tooling with a simple example is probably a good idea), or browse the documentation and javadocs.

jBPM 5.3.0.Final has been released in sync with the latest Drools 5.4.0.Final release.

We're still updating our docs and writing some blogs on the new features as we speak, so you can expect more updates from us soon!

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