Process-driven applications at Devoxx 2015

I just finished my presentation at Devoxx this year, on process-driven applications.  The conference is a lot of fun, with a big Red Hat presence, talking about JBoss Middleware, OpenShift, Red Hat Developer program and a lot more.

It wasn't the regular presentation where we try to showcase all capabilities and list all the features of our project (as most people probably have seen one of those at some point already), but I wanted to focus on something special instead.

The project has evolved significantly in the last few years, and I believe we have now reached a point where we have a lot of building blocks in place to help you develop your application.

Rather than focusing on the technology, process-driven application development starts from a different goal, i.e. building something customized to what you need. By taking advantage of the workbench, you can build and execute your processes as usual, but rather than relying on the generic tooling we provide, you have access to all data and features we offer out-of-the-box, but combine them in a customized way.

In the demo, I built out a small expenses process, and a custom screen (using AngularJS) that can list my current expenses and create new ones just the way I want to.  You can even add some small dashboards to keep track of the number of open expense reports or a quick overview of how many expense reports you submitted in the last year and when.

I also showed how to support more flexible and adaptive cases, where you want to give the end user the capability to make decisions or to dynamically add new tasks (all the way to the extreme where you don't define anything upfront but start a new ad-hoc case).  And obviously you can combine both, creating a custom application to drive your patient cases:

(click to enlarge)

My slides are available here.  The presentation itself was recorded and is available (for free) as well:

Devoxx Belgium (November 9 - 13)

Devoxx Belgium 2015 is from November 9th until 13th, and is expecting no less than 3.500 Devoxxians to come to Antwerp again.  Red Hat has always had a strong presence there (both on the conference schedule and around, in BOFs, on the booth area, etc.) and this year is going to be no different! 

From our team, Mario Fusco and Geoffrey Desmet will be joining (with a Java8 presentation and an ignite session respectively), and I'll be giving a presentation on process-driven application development on Thursday:

Even the simplest application ideas always end up requiring more development than you hoped for: maintaining long-lived state, interaction with other services or human actors performing some of the work, showing current status of ongoing requests, management and reporting, etc. Business processes and rules allow you to externalize some of that logic and dynamically update it, but you don't want your business process management (BPM) system to get in your way either. And every application is different, so you want to be able to fully control every bit of it.

Using process-driven application development, you define your application logic in a (flexible) business process, but you also expect your BPM system to help you out with much more than that. In this session we will show you live how to quickly get new web applications up and running by relying on jBPM to provide some of the UI (should you want to), or even to generate parts of your application for you (that you can customize later), so you can focus on what makes your application different. jBPM uses the power of open source and it's flexible architecture to let you decide what you need: nothing more, nothing less.

If you look at the entire schedule or speaker list, you'll find a lot of other interesting Red Hat speakers like Aslak Knutsen, Charles Nutter, Antoine Sabot-Durand, Clement Escoffier, Dimitris Andreadis, Diogenes Rettori, Paulo Lopez, Roland Huß and Xavier Coulon (I hope my quick search didn't miss anyone).

Hope to see you there !