1. jBPM 4
Tom Baeyens
JBoss, Red Hat
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2. Agenda
• What is jBPM
• jBPM 4 Goals
• jBPM 4 Use Cases
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3. Tom Baeyens
• Lead and founder of JBoss jBPM
• Consulting for numerous BPM projects
• Bringing BPM mainstream
• Articles
– InfoQ, TSS, Dzone, OnJava,…
• Blogs
– http://processdevelopments.blogspot.com/
• Talks
– JavaOne, JBossWorld, JAOO, TSS,…
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4. What is jBPM
• Business Process Management
– BPM as a discipline
– BPM as software engineering
• jBPM
– BPM for Java Developer
– Manage task lists for people
– Orchestrate POJO code
– Transactional state machine library
– Graphical
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5. What is jBPM
Your App
Your Architecture
jBPM
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6. What is jBPM
• Model process
– Declare tasks
– Bind to your
POJO Java code
• Decorate
– Asynchronous
continuations
– Timers
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7. jBPM 4 Goals
• Improve supportability
• Grow to next level of adoption
• Raise 'ability to execute'
• Implementation improvements
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8. Improve Supportability
• Separation between normal usage from bleeding
edge usage
– public API vs internal packages
– Userguide vs devguide
• More stable database / process definition caching
– Migration between 4.x releases (plan)
• Automatic JBoss installation
– No messing with configs and libs
– Tested configurations
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9. Improve Supportability
• Continuous integration
– Ability to reproduce bugs
– Collect community knowledge in test suite
Ability to keep improving over longer time
Longer lifespan of jBPM 4
• Config import system
– Less error prone
– Imports for hibernate tx, jta tx, spring tx
– Allows for default updates in default imports
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10. Grow to Next Level of Adoption
• Lowering the treshold to get started
– Simpler API
• Split normal usage from bleeding edge
• API based queries
– Better container and app pluggability
• Much! improved docs
• Examples
• Automatic installations
– Remove need for messing on your own
• Easier configuration abstraction through imports 10

11. Increase ‘Ability to Execute'
• Historical data separated from runtime data
– Queryable history information
– Keeps runtime data healthy
• Improved transaction mappings
• Proper handling of timers and external triggers
• More stable database
– DB data migration becomes possible
• Improved job executor
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12. Implementation Improvements
• Improved pluggable architecture
– Changed composition to inheritence.
– Direct variable access
• Interfaces for activity implementations
– Only exposing the methods that can be invoked.
• Changed recursion with iteration
– Dealing with automatic long loops.
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13. Use Case 1: Rapid Prototyping
• Model the process
• Include tasks
• Generate forms
• Deploy
• Show live demo
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14. Use Cases 2: Transactional Script
• Model the script process
• Delegate activities
– To POJO user code
– EJBeans
– SEAM beans
• Demarcate
– Asynchonous continuations
– Timers
• Update control flow
– Hot redeploy
– Changed logic
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15. Use Cases 3: Pageflow
• Pages are activities
• Navigations are transitions
• Persistence in HTTP session
• SEAM
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16. jPDL Activities
• Control flow • Functional
transition state
start sub-process
end task
end-cancel java
end-error script
decision esb
fork hql
join sql
super-state
sub-process
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17. jPDL Features
• Lots of functional activities
– mail, java, esb, task,…
• Concurrency
• Event listeners
• Timers
• Asynchronous continuations
• Transactional exception handlers
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18. State Choice
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19. State Choice
<process name="StateChoice">
<start>
<transition to="wait for response"/>
</start>
<state name="wait for response" >
<transition name="accept" to="submit document" />
<transition name="reject" to="try again" />
</state>
<state name="submit document" />
<state name="try again" />
</process>
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20. State Choice
// create a configuration
Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
// build a process engine from a configuration
ProcessEngine processEngine =
configuration.buildProcessEngine();
// Obtain the services from the process engine
// ProcessEngine and Services are to be used as singletons.
// (ie they are threadsafe)
RepositoryService repositoryService =
processEngine.getRepositoryService();
ExecutionService executionService =
processEngine.getExecutionService();
TaskService taskService = processEngine.getTaskService();
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21. State Choice
repositoryService.createDeployment()
.addResourceFromClasspath(
"org/jbpm/examples/state/choice/process.jpdl.xml“)
.deploy();
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22. State Choice
ProcessInstance processInstance = executionService
.startProcessInstanceByKey("StateChoice");
String executionId = processInstance
.findActiveExecutionIn("wait for response")
.getId();
processInstance = executionService
.signalExecutionById(executionId, "accept");
assertEquals("submit document",
processInstance.getActivityName());
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23. Designer
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24. Console
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25. Conclusion
• jBPM provides overview of application
– External triggers
– Wait states
– Business view
• jBPM adds a layer on top of TX basics
– Transactional timers
– Asynchronous messages
• Integrates with
– Standard & Enterprise Java
– JBoss and other app servers
– SEAM
– Spring
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26. Q&A
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27. Process Concurrency
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