Webinar JBoss BPM Suite 6.0 available on demand

The webinar we recently did on JBoss BPM Suite 6.0, including a 15-20min demo of the web tooling in action, is now available on demand.  Click the "Register Now" button below to register and you'll be able to view the entire webinar on demand.

Automate workflows now with a leading open source BPM platform

Looking to build powerful workflow automation solutions? Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.0, now generally available, brings Business Activity Monitoring and Business Process Management capabilities from the jBPM community project together in to a single, integrated product.

Join us in this webinar to learn:

• How to get started quickly with the fully integrated User Interface, Process Simulation and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools.
• The best use cases for running the process execution as a stand alone server vs. embedded mode. 
• How to seamlessly manage decision logic with business rules optimization
• What's coming next...

Speakers:

Prakash Aradhya, Product Management Director, JBoss BPM and BRMS Platforms, Red Hat
Prakash Aradhya is responsible for driving the product strategy and roadmap for JBoss Enterprise BRMS and BPM products. He has over 15 years of experience in product development and product management in the middleware software industry.

Dr Kris Verlaenen, Principal Software Engineer, Lead BPM Architect, Red Hat
Kris Verlaenen leads the jBPM Project effort and is also one of the core developers of the Drools project, to which he started contributing in 2006. After finishing his PhD in Computer Science in 2008, he joined JBoss full-time and became the Drools Flow lead. He has a keen interest in the healthcare domain, one of the areas that have already shown to have a great need for a unified process, rule and event processing framework. 

Reward system demo

In the webinar I did last week, I showed a demo that creates a simple reward system where employees can give rewards to each other (that then need to be approved by HR).

The demo shows how to create a new application from scratch using a clean setup (using the latest jBPM installer) where a business user and a developer work together to create the business process. We then generate the necessary JUnit tests and task forms for this process, deploy it to the Guvnor repository and execute it on the jBPM console.

The demo is now available as six small screencasts.

In the first video, a business user uses the web-based Designer (that is integrated into the Guvnor repository) to create a rough, first version of the process.

• The business user defines that first someone from HR should approve (or reject) the request
• The process should then send an approval email to they employee if the request was approved.
• The developer can then import this process into his Eclipse workspace.

The second video shows how the developer edits this process and adds all the necessary details to make it fully executable.

The third video shows how a JUnit test can be generated from the process definition to test the process.

• The developer generates a JUnit test for the process (see last part of the second video)
• He then fills in some of the data that needs to be passed to the process
• The test executes successfully

The fourth video shows how forms (a process form to start the process and a task form to approve requests) are generated from the process definition and customized a little.

The fifth video uploads all these files onto the Guvnor repository and builds them so they can be used in production.

Finally, the process is executed in the jBPM console, where we start a new approval process and let someone from HR reject it.

You should be able to reproduce this yourself completely, simply by following the steps in the video. Hope you all like it !

A preview of the Form Builder

Whenever human actors participate in business processes (for example using the jbpm-console), forms can be used to show information to these users and/or ask for additional input. For example, the performance evaluation example that is included in the installer uses a simple form (as shown below) to ask the user to fill in some data related to his performance evaluation.


jBPM5 allows you to define these forms yourself, using a HTML template approach, so that they can be used in the console.

We've also been working a Form Builder, a web-based application that also allows business users (and not only developers) to create these forms using a visual editor and drag-and-drop. Mariano has published a blog including a cool demo that shows the progress so far.

Not only is the form builder nicely integrated into the existing tooling, it also allows you to generate default forms based on the process definition (based on the expected input and output parameters of the user tasks or process). The user can then customize the generated form and start using it in the console almost immediately.

(double-click on the video or on this link to see a larger version)

I can only say congratz ! :)

Note that we still need to integrate most of this into our codebase, but we already wanted to share what's coming.

An executable process using the designer

Tihomir has been working on the designer lately to make sure that the web-based process designer can be used to create executable processes from scratch using the designer only.

He has created a nice screencast and blogged about it:

"Here is an example of creating and executing a simple BPMN2 process created with the Oryx designer (click on the screenshot below). It shows off the ability to create both business rules and BPMN2 processes in the same environment and expose them to the client application that consume them.











In order to recreate this example, you must use the latest version of the Oryx designer which you can download from here (rename it to designer.war and replace your existing one in $jbossHome/server/$config/deploy directory). If you prefer to use the jbpm-console for executing the process instead of from Eclipse like shown in the example, you can do that as well if you define the process as part of the defaultPackage (or update your jbpm-console configuration to load processes from another package)."

A process repository using Guvnor

One of the missing pieces in the jBPM 5.0 CR1 release was the inclusion of a process repository. Luckily, your waiting time is over!

A process repository is an important part of your BPM architecture if you start using more and more business processes in your applications and especially if you want to have the ability to dynamically update them. The process repository is the location where you store and manage your business processes. Because they are not deployed as part of your application, they have their own life cycle, meaning you can update your business processes dynamically, without having to change the application code.

Note that a process repository is a lot more than simply a database to store your process definitions. It almost acts as a combination of a source code management system, content management system, collaboration suite and development and testing environment. These are the kind of features you can expect from a process repository:

• Persistent storage of your processes so the latest version can always easily be accessed from anywhere, including versioning
• Build and deploy selected processes
  
• User-friendly (web-based) interface to manage, update and deploy your processes (targeted to business users, not just developers)
  
• Authentication / authorization to make sure only people that have the right role can see and/or edit your processes
• Categorization and searching
  
• Scenario testing to make sure you don't break anything when you change your process
  
• Collaboration and other social features like comments, notifications on change, etc.
  
• Synchronization with your development environment

Actually, it would be better to talk about a knowledge repository, as the repository will not only store your process definitions, but possibly also other related artefacts like task forms, your domain model, associated business rules, etc. Luckily, we don't have to reinvent the wheel for this, as the Guvnor project acts as a generic knowledge repository to store any type of artefacts and already supports most of these features.

The following screencast shows how you can upload your process definition to Guvnor, along with the process form (that is used when you try to start a new instance of that process to collect the necessary data), task forms (for the human tasks inside the process), and the process image (that can be annotated to show runtime progress). The jbpm-console is configured to get all this information from Guvnor whenever necessary and show them in the console.


If you use the latest snapshot version of the jbpm-installer, that should automatically download and install the latest snapshot of Guvnor as well. So simply deploy your assets (for example using the Guvnor Eclipse integration as shown in the screencast, also automatically installed) to Guvnor (taking some naming conventions into account, as explained below), build the package and start up the console.

The current integration with the jbpm-console uses the following naming conventions to find the artefacts it needs (though we hope to update this to something more flexible in the near future):

• All artefacts should be deployed to the "defaultPackage" on Guvnor (as that is where the jbpm-console will be looking)
• A process should define "defaultPackage" as the package name (otherwise you won't be able to build your package on Guvnor)
  
• Task forms that should be associated with a specific process definition should have the name "{processDefinitionId}.ftl"
• Task forms for a specific human task should have the name "{taskName}.ftl"
• The process diagram for a specific process should have the name "{processDefinitionId}-image.png"

If you follow these rules, your processes, forms and images should show up without any issues in the jbpm-console.