Vote for JBoss Community Recognition Awards !

Voting for the JBoss Community Recognition Awards is now open !

Each year, we ask the JBoss project leads to nominate contributors that they feel have make significant and leading contributions to the JBoss.org Community over the past year. It’s that time again, and those nominations are now complete - so let the voting begin!

We have added a new category this year, “Community Leadership,” so the categories are now:

• Community Leadership
• New features
• Bug fixes
• Issue/JIRA
• Wiki
• Documentation

Several key jBPM community contributors were nominated this year, so your help on giving them the recognition they deserve would really be appreciated !

So please go and vote now !

I would personally like to thank everyone that contributed (in one way or the other) in the last year already.  You all deserve an award ! :-) 

• Bug Fixes:
  
  
• Esteban Aliverti - Esteban has shown tireless commitment to improving the overall quality of the project. From testing edge scenarios to fixing high profile bugs, no part of the code is out of his reach: fixing bugs from the core engine to the web tooling, Esteban has left his mark and helped improve the code for the benefit of the whole community.

•  Community Leadership
  
• Demian Calcaprina - Demian is a very active jBPM Community Member, as he's helping on the forums, reporting issues, etc.  He is also very active testing new releases and reporting back with suggestions and improvements.
  
  He was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012, where he worked on extending the jBPM human task service with a pluggable life cycle (which a task goes through, from creation through claiming and starting all the way through completing, etc.) using a business process, executed by jBPM core engine. 
  
  Demian is currently working as a Software Engineer at Viridian, but he is also offering freelance consulting services on Drools and jBPM.
     

•  New Features
  
• Mariano de Maio - Mariano is a very active community member who is always helping both in the community channels and on his own blog: http://marianbuenosayres.wordpress.com
  
  He is a Drools & jBPM Consultant who has contributed with the Infinispan and Drools integration and with the jBPM Form Builder. He has also reported and helped fix several bugs in the Drools and jBPM source code, providing comprehensive test suites. Mariano is now helping with the development of several components of the new jBPM Console NG.
  
• Saiful Omar - Saiful has been promoting and using jBPM in his academic research, which focuses on Process Adaptation and Compliance. He has published various papers where he describes an adaptive compliance workflow management system built on top of jBPM. 
  
  Saiful has been contributing to the jBPM Designer (i.e. a web-based process designer) with important features like:
  
  (1) Locking and Unlocking feature - this feature allows users of jBPM Designer to lock certain parts of the business process model in order to foster collaboration during the modelling phase of BPM. Locked parts of the model could be seen as ""feature complete"" and unlocked onces are what needs to be finished. Locked nodes can easily be unlocked as well if needed.
  
  (2) Microsoft Academic Search Service Node - the first community contributed jBPM service node definition and implementation. It allows users to easily add the Microsoft Search feature into their business processes. This contribution has been added to the jBPM community service node repository.

Drools & jBPM Walk in center @ Red Hat Summit (free and open for everyone)

There's a FREE opportunity if you are in the Boston area next week on Thursday.  A lot of us will be there for JUDCon and Red Hat Summit and we want to give you the opportunity to come and ask questions.

We have a dedicated room for community members to come and chat. The room should be open to all, not just those with Summit passes, although you'll need to tell security where you are going.  So whether you're already coming to Summit, or in the vicinity and want to join us, don't hesitate.

Day: Thursday, June 13th, 2013
Location: Boston, Hynes Convention Centre, Hynes Room 110

Time: 09.30 to 17.00

There will be chairs and tables, so you can spend as long as you like.  Mark Proctor, Edson Tirelli, Pedro Zapata and myself will be there all day, with probably other people dropping in as well.  No question too small, no task too big :) We can help you getting everything installed, give some mentoring on your current projects, or help you dive deep into Drools or jBPM code.

Feel free to drop in with quick questions on how to do something, or to check you're doing it right, or generic questions about Drools & jBPM itself, about the roadmap, etc.  There will be chairs and tables, so you can stay longer and hang out and code :)

Preparing for JUDCon + Red Hat Summit in Boston

A yearly visit to Boston has become a tradition it seems, I'll be attending the JUDCon Boston 2013 and the Red Hat Summit 2013 events next week !

JUDCon is the conference by and for developers, and it's an ideal place to get an overview of what's to come in the various projects, have a chat with the core developers or just grab some beers and have some fun ;)

I'll be presenting "What's new in jBPM6" on Tuesday ...

Business Process Management (BPM) is changing, and so is the jBPM project! It's no longer a tool used by developers to implement some low-level business logic, but it has evolved to a service offered to business analysts, developers and even end users to model, manage and monitor their business processes.
jBPM6 has a lot improvements in this area, and in this session we would like to take you through the most important ones. We will demonstrate the new web-based user interface, but also dive deeper into some technical improvements (like for example how we've simplified session and task service management, how to build your processes and how to scale your application).

... but do check out the agenda for a lot more interesting talks !

Red Hat Summit is the yearly Red Hat conference, to showcase the latest and greatest in cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage, and systems management technologies.  There's a huge amount of sessions, in a very large spectrum of topics.

I'll be presenting "" on Friday, together with Pedro Zapata ...

Business environments are complex. To run an efficient and effective organization in today’s world, business users need to be able to clearly analyze and understand business activities, model repeatable processes, and have clear visibility into process executions. And to be able to effectively interface with the system, business users need convenient tools. JBoss jBPM 6, a JBoss Community project, is set in that direction, built with sophisticated tools to empower business users.
In this session, Kris Verlaenen and Pedro Zapata Fernandez will discuss the state of these tools in JBoss jBPM and discuss the Polymita tools that are now part of jBPM 6. They will also demonstrate the:

• Improved process modeling, covering process design, form design, and data modeling
• New dashboard builder used to create rich KPI reports and graphs
• Redesigned task management and process monitoring interface
• New process analysis and simulation tools

 ... but there are a lot more BPM-related sessions and workshops to enjoy !

It's not too late to register, so don't miss this opportunity !  I hope to see you all there and discuss whatever is on your mind.

Car Insurance Policy Quote demo

The Red Hat UK SA team has been working at a demonstration that shows how different Red Hat projects can be brought together to form one big solution.  As part of this, they created a demo that shows a Car Insurance Policy Quote process:

It asks the user for input (driver information and car information and does various calculations in between to calculate the policy risk and price, using a decision table.  It is using JBoss BRMS 5.3.1 (which includes support for jBPM5) on top of EAP6.

Derek created a small video showing this in action as well:

The sources can be found here. Eric Schabell also extracted the policy quote process and packaged it inside his demo framework here.

Enjoy!

jBPM 6.0 Beta2 available

For developers that want to have a sneak peak at what's coming in jBPM 6.0, we've just released jBPM 6.0.0.Beta2.  We've added several large improvements:

• jbpm-console, our web-based management console (where you can start new process instances, complete your task list, etc.) has been redesigned completely


• new task UI

• new process instance management UI
  
  
  
• one web application that combines the entire life cycle (process modeling, deployment, execution and monitoring) into one web application
  
• based on UberFire, which provides a configurable and pluggable workspace

• RuntimeManager allows you to easily get access to a ksession and/or task service without needing to worry about how to create the session, where to find it, how to link it to the task service, etc.  There are predefined strategies for:
• singleton: one singleton session is used to execute all requests
• session per request: a new session is used for each request (and destroyed afterwards)
• session per process instance: each process instance has its own session context, all commands for that process instance are automatically executed in that context
  
  
• jbpm-services: core engine exposed as a service that can be deployed in a clustered environment, with lots of smaller improvements as well:
• timer service that will be able to handle timers in a clustered environment and automatically restore the appropriate sessions if timers need to be fired
• instead of using the process instance id as the unique identifier of one specific process instance, you can also correlate with your own business key now
• history logging has been extended to log additional information and an asychronous logger (using JMS) is available as well
• all services are exposed using CDI
• ! Note that remoting capabilities using REST / JMS are currently not available yet in Beta2 but will be available soon

• The Guvnor repository has been refactored:
• The repository back-end is implemented using a Virtual File System (VFS) with a git back-end as the default implementation.  This allows you to connect to your repository taking advantage of all the features that GIT provides out-of-the-box.
• The repository now uses maven to build all the processes, rules, models, forms etc. in your projects and produces kjars (knowledge jars).  These kjars can be treated as normal maven dependencies in your projects and the repository exposes itself as a maven repository as well.

• A Dashboard web application can be used to monitor your system and generate meaningful reports.  Some default reports are available out-of-the-box (showing information about running process instances, outstanding tasks, etc.), but the tool can also be used to combine those with your own business datam create your own KPIs and customized reports.
  


• Improved exception handling when performing service tasks, where the process that requested the service could be notified using a combination of techniques, including boundary events, event sub-processes, intermediate events, etc.
  
• The new Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler replaced the old BPMN2 editor and has been extended to support a lot more constructs.  Designer has been updated accordingly as well.

• Designer now supports the BPSim 1.0 specification for simulating your processes.

You can download the installer from here and follow the installer documentation and screencasts (below) to get your first processes running, both in Eclipse (for developers and in the web (for business analysts or even end users as well).

Note that this is a beta release, so unfortunately, most of the documentation is still missing, and there probably are some rough edges and/or bugs in there.  But do give it a try and let us know, so we can try to still improve these.

Google Summer of Code 2013

JBoss is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2013 program, which means that students can work on their favourite open-source project during the summer and get ultimate glory and a nice paycheck in return.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. We have worked with the open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the upcoming summer.

JBoss has created a list of possible ideas you can take a look at, but you can always propose us your own ideas as well !

For jBPM, we've added two ideas to the list, but there is a Wiki page with over 10 possible proposals available here, including:

• jBPM on android
• Integrating jBPM with your own preferred project(s)
• jBPM performance on steroids
• Document management system
• Mobile client(s) for jBPM
• From BPEL to BPMN2
• Social BPM using jBPM
• Process mining for jBPM
• jBPM and Drools for access control
• jBPM and Drools for clinical decision support

The deadline for student applications is May 3rd, 19:00 UTC, so if you're interested but didn't submit anything yet, you'll need to be fast!

BPSim and jBPM

jBPM has been an early adopter, supporter, and implementer of the Business Process Simulation Interchange Standard (BPSim). We believe that BPSim (which is a WfMC standard) will create a wide adoption of business process simulation in the BPM community, and are very happy to be part of that effort.

With the BPSim version 1.0 recently released, we have updated our jBPM core engine, simulation engine (which is based on the core engine) and our web-based tooling (jBPM Designer) to this latest version of the specification.

If you are interested in learning more about BPSim and jBPM or just have any questions feel free to talk to us on our IRC channels.

Here is the link to the jBPM Designer business process simulation capabilities that Tihomir posted before. We are adding new features and usability enhancements to it that should be out soon, so stay tuned.