IntelliFest conference with Drools & jBPM bootcamp

In 4 weeks, the IntelliFest 2012 conference will take place in San Diego (starting Monday October 22nd).  IntelliFest is the successor of RulesFest and as always brings a mix of presentations, both for managers and developers, and bootcamps to get the practical experience.  

As part of that, there will also be a FREE Drools & jBPM bootcamp and a healthcare day.  Tihomir will take care of the jBPM presentations there, giving an overview of jBPM, BPMN2 and human tasks.

Program Overview:
Monday - Healthcare focus for Rules, Workflow, Ontologies and Events (Free)
Tuesday - General Drools&jBPM session (Free)
Wed - Fri - General IntelliFest Sessions

There are limited spaces, so register soon here.

Monday - Healthcare focus for Rules, Workflow, Ontologies and Events (free)

0830-0920 Captain Emory Fry, MD
Socratic Grid : Open Source Distributed Decision Support for Healthcare

0930-1020  Dr Robert Greenes, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University
Key Note : Embedding Decision Support in Clinical Systems

1030-1120 Dr Aziz Boxwala, Division of Biomedical Informatics, University of California
Clinical Decision Support Consortium

1130-1200 Dr Seong Ki Mun, President and CEO of OSEHRA
Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent 

1200:1300 Lunch

1300-1350  Dr Davide Sottara, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University
Knowledge Representation Standards For Building Executable Clinical Processes Models

1400-1450 David Shields, Health ITS, University of Utah
OpenCDS: a Clinical Decision Support Infrastructure Based on Drools

1500-1520 Harold Solbring, Division of Biomedical Informatics, Mayo Clinic
Semantic Wiki

1530-1655 Conor Dowling, Caregraf
Semantic Terminology Services

1600-1620 Dr Xiao Hu, Department of Neurosurgery, University of California
Clinical Decision Support Driven Alarms

1630-1700
Panel Discussion - Collaboration Opportunities

Tuesday - General Drools&jBPM Workshop (free)

 

8.00 AM: Breakfast Social – pre-laptop setup, and QA time with solution Architects. 
-Key will be provided to setup your laptop, so you can view and run the examples used during the talks.

9.00 BRMS Product Overview (Prakash Aradhya 15min) 
How we turn the Drools and jBPM communtiy parts into a world class product. Supporting and harvesting all the innovation done in the open community, Red Hat delivers reliable, dependable and integrated solutions for enterprise customers.

9.15 Introduction to Drools Expert (Mark Proctor 45min) 
Drools Expert covers the business rule engine. A gentle, example driven, dive into the Drools technical rule language and engine features.

10.10 Introduction to Drools Fusion (Edson Tirelli 45min) 
Learn how Drools does CEP differently. Our unified approach extends Drools Expert with a series of language and sub-engine extensions to provide temporal reasoning and event correlation.

11.05 Introduction to jBPM and BPMN2 (Tihomir Surdilovic 45min) 
jBPM is a BPM engine designed for flexible processes, implementing and extending the BPMN2 spec. Built form the ground up to be part of a unified strategy for business automation and decision management. jBPM fully integrates with Drools Expert and Fusion.

11.45 Decision Modelling with Graphical Editors (Edson Tirelli 30min) 
Drools Expert provides sophisticated web based tooling, around decision tables, guided editors and templates. Our decision modelling approach draws from the very best research found at Dr Jan Vanthienien school of Decision Modelling.

12.30 Working Lunch – Experience Drools and jBPM – Hands on labs (Optional) (1hour)

13.30 Human Tasks up Close and Personal (Tihomir Surdilovic 40min) 
Human tasks are a central component of BPM. This example driven talk will build an example live, demonstrating what jBPM’s Human Task technology can do for you.

14.20 Building Games with Drools – Pong, Snake and Wumpus (Mark Proctor 40min) 
Time for some hard play, learn how to build classic computer games with Drools. These also provide interesting exercises in BA requirements gathering.

15.10 Drools Planner a Quick Overview (Geoffrey De Smet 40min) 
Whether it’s employee rostering, task scheduling, vehicle routing, bin packing or another planning problem: all organizations try to optimize their limited resources under constraints. Drools Planner optimizes business resources for normal Java programmers.

15.50 Drools Chance for Imperfect Reasoning (Davide Sottara 40min) 
Sometimes data quality is not perfect, so facts may not be known with precision and certainty. Likewise, crisp constraints such as hard thresholds might not be able to capture the complexity of a business policy. Drools Chance allows to apply gradual and/or probabilistic constraints to uncertain or vague data.

16.40 UberFire – Drools&jBPM Workbench framework (Mark Proctor 30min) 
UberFire is a new project that forms the foundation of our 6.0 web tooling. It’s standalone framework that provides a sophisticated workbench framework for the web; where everything is a plugin. Come learn about the Uberfire, and how you can use the workbench to build your own web applications.

17.10 Drools&jBPM 6.0 and Beyond (Optional : open as long as people remain) 
An open presentation and discussion about the design ideas, principles and goals that are driving the development of Drools & jBPM version 6.0. This will be an optional and informal session where attendees will have the opportunity to learn about what is coming, contribute ideas and provide feedback that will be taken in consideration by the development team.

17.10 Hands on Lab 
Run at the same time as "Drools&jBPM and Beyond" and Beyond. Solution Architects are on hand to help you with your coding problems, and running examples.

Red Hat Acquires BPM Technology from Polymita

Yesterday it was announced that Red Hat acquires BPM technology from Polymita.

The deal accelerates Red Hat’s entry into the BPM software segment and augments its JBoss Enterprise Middleware integration software offerings.

“The ability to change rapidly is an absolute necessity for businesses in today’s enterprise environment. Organizations that do not empower their business users to quickly and effectively modify automated business processes forfeit the ability to remain agile, competitive and relevant,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of middleware at Red Hat. “Polymita’s technology enhances Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio and specifically complements JBoss Enterprise BRMS and jBPM.”

Polymita is a Barcelona, Spain-based start-up that created a comprehensive BPM platform and was positioned as a Visionary in latest BPMS Magic Quadrant.

We're very happy they joined the JBoss family and are looking forward to join forces behind a singular vision, bringing our BPM offering to the next level even faster now!

A FAQ section already provides some answers, but more details on the how and what will be shared as soon as possible.

jBPM: What did I miss last 2 weeks?

I've been on vacation for a few weeks (was able to escape the Belgian weather and enjoy some France "joie de vivre"), and this time I decided to really leave work behind while on vacation.  That means I'll probably be catching up on email for about a week or so, but the rest of the team hasn't been slacking, so what did I miss?

• Tihomir has been experimenting with voice-driven BPM in the Designer, where you can use voice commands to create your processes.  This is still our first, experimental attempt at including something like this during the modelling phase, but I definitely believe this will be useful for some of you (although I don't think everyone will all of a sudden start talking to their laptop ;)).  Click on the link above to see a screencast of it in action.
   
• Mauricio has written a series of blog entries on how processes and rules (or rules and processes) integrate (part1, part2 and part3).  It starts with some examples on how processes and rules can be combined, and then goes into detail on how most BPM systems do it, and some of the more advanced features that are available in jBPM to do more advanced integration as well.

• Maciej did a blog post about his presentation at JUDCon Boston this year on what he calls jBPM enterprise, which tries to improve the integration into Java EE environments.  It bundles jBPM and Drools into JBoss Modules and uses OSGi and maven archetypes to create a web application on top.

• Mauricio describes the current state of the jBPM form builder in this blog post, where he explains how you can use the form builder without depending on guvnor and how you can integrate forms in your own web application.  Click on the link above to see the associated video.

• Finally, Tihomir describes how task form editing can be done inline in the web designer, so while modelling your process, using a simple HTML template editor (with features like code completion and live preview) and customizable form widgets.  Also includes a screencast of it in action, including a process form for use on mobile.  Next is integration of the form builder as an option there too.

I should go on vacation more often it seems ;)

Microsoft Academic Search Service Task – contributed by Saiful Omar

Tihomir worked with Saiful Omar on getting one of his service tasks contributed back into the jBPM service repository:

Our jBPM contributor Saiful Omar who also contributed the Designer Locking and Unlocking feature keeps doing a great job  and has also contributed an implementation of a service node for the Microsoft Academic Search.
This service node is now available in the jBPM community service repository and can easily be installed and used in your own business processes using the jBPM Web and Eclipse tooling. Here is a description of the service node inputs and outputs as well as information on how to obtain the free MAS AppID which is required to use the Microsoft Academic Search.

 Thank you, and keep up the good work !  Check out Tiho's blog for more screenshots and details !

The intelligent, integrated shipping company video

With jBPM now part of BRMS 5.3, they created a cool video about it.

This fun, easy-to-understand video illustrates how the combined business rules, business process and complex event processing capabilities of JBoss Enterprise BRMS can help shipping companies become intelligent, integrated enterprises.

It's a marketing video, don't expect anything technical ;)  I think it's fun to watch though !

jBPM Webinar today

In case you missed the emails, I'm doing a webinar presentation July 16th, 2012 on "jBPM 5: Build intelligent business processes".

Join this webinar to get the lowdown on jBPM 5 from Kris Verlaenen, Red Hat’s jBPM 5 project lead. While you’re at it, learn how to build intelligent business processes by leveraging the combined power of business rules, business events, and processes.

Popular jBPM 5, now part of JBoss Enterprise BRMS
jBPM 5—one of the most popular open source BPM/workflow solutions on the market — is being productized as part of JBoss® Enterprise BRMS, which injects intelligence into static business processes.

jBPM key functions and future direction
Adopted by many enterprises for its lightweight footprint, embeddable engine, and ease of use, jBPM takes these unique characteristics to the next level by adopting the popular BPMN 2 standard—the choice of standard for modeling and native execution. Check out this webinar to learn about jBPM 5’s key functions and future direction, including:

• BPMN 2-based process modeling using rich web-based designer and Eclipse editor.
• Human interaction based on the WS-HT standard.
• Process monitoring and debugging.
• Support plan through JBoss’ enterprise product.

Date: July 16, 2012

Time: 16:00 UTC / 12 noon (New York) / 6 p.m. (Paris) / 9:30 p.m. (Mumbai)

Length: 01:00

Language: English

Audience: Business and Technical

Register Now

JBossWorld Keynote Demo

jBPM was a big part of the JBossWorld keynote demo this year!  The demo featured the JBoss Toy Store, a simple shopping cart application.  You could use your mobile device to order various products (from phones to shirts), and a jBPM process was used to handle and manage the orders, all running in the cloud (on OpenShift).

The full video of the keynote is available below (you can skip to 14min30 if you immediately want to skip to the demo itself, which in total takes about 20min), this blog will explain some of the details on how jBPM was used to achieve this.

Whenever a new order was placed (either through one of the mobile clients or the web-based client), a process described the life cycle of the order. The process itself is shown below.  The process itself is modelled using the BPMN 2.0 standard (both the visualization and the XML format used to store the process) and was defined in the web-based designer.

After some initialization, a Risk Assessment was done to decide whether the order was high or low risk.  This was modelled using a Business Rule Task, that in this case used a web-based decision table to make the decision.  In the demo, we simply look at the amount of the order, to decide whether it is high risk (larger than or equal to 500$) or not (less than 500$), but this could easily be extended with more complex logic.

All orders needed to go through a first Review (where a sales representative would manually check whether the order was valid and would accept or reject the order, for example to get rid of fake or unwanted orders etc.).  High-risk orders would undergo an additional Vice President Review (our VP really wanted to keep control of the company).  In the demo, the VP (played by Jay on stage) automatically rejected orders above 3000$ (just to make sure our participants needed to play smart to win ;)).  Both review tasks were modelled using a User Task and contained various details on who to assign the task to, the data associated with the task, etc.  After the review(s), the order was then either shipped (which we modelled using a domain-specific Service Task), or a rejection email was sent (using the out-of-the-box Email Service Task).

People in the audience were invited to participate in this experiment and put in orders.  A leaderboard was used to show the overall progress.  This showed the total amount of orders per person, and some dials and charts showing the order transaction rate, order backlog (orders still being processed), etc.  The data was collected by listening to and/or querying the jBPM engine and/or task service.

We used a process monitor to visualize where all the orders were waiting.  The number on top of each node shows how many orders are currently waiting there.  This view is actually the web-designer that we extended with this monitoring information (that was updated every few seconds from a REST service that would provide the necessary information).  We're working on getting this integrated in the project by default as soon as possible.

In the demo, we played out a scenario where a lot of the orders got stuck in the VP Review (as Jay wasn't able to approve all the incoming orders fast enough), generating a huge backlog.  It's kinda difficult to explain, so I suggest you just take a look at the demo to see how it played out ;)  By changing the business logic on the fly, we then allowed better throughput (and yes, we also used a bot to help Jay a little with approving all these orders more quickly, but everything was real, no cheating ;)).

Some technical details:

• Everything (web-based designer + guvnor repository, jBPM engine, dashboards and process monitor) was running in the cloud (on OpenShift), on AS7. The laptops simply used a web browser to show the web-based apps running there.
• The jBPM engine was embedded as part of the shopping cart application, and was invoked whenever a new order was retrieved, or when any of the review tasks were done.  One session was used to handle all requests.
• The engine was configured to user persistence (using Hibernate4 / JPA2 and an H2 in memory database)
• The changes done in the application and by the jBPM engine were combined in one user transaction.
• The default task service (that comes with jBPM out-of-the-box) was used to manage the task lists and the life cycle of each tasks.  We used one local task service (running next to the engine) to make sure these changes were also done in the same transaction and avoid remote communication.

The source of the demo application is available here.  You can download and run the application on your own laptop, or even push it to OpenShift as well.

We really enjoyed creating and doing the demo, and we hope so will you!