jBPM Community Day

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/jbpm-community-day/

Great to be able to attend the very first jBPM Community Day in Dublin last weekend.  The weather was fantastic; clear blue skies, sun and more sun (remember this is Ireland!) and we were catered for in the Guinness Storehouse where the welcome was warm and hospitable.

As usual I was early for an event and got chatting with Tom Baeyens and other members of the jBPM core development team whilst they were setting up!  The centre of gravity for this team is Belgium so it was interesting that Dublin had been chosen for the event but I have to say that the event was well supported from the burgeoning Irish tech community.  Hi to all those that I met.

As well as Ireland there was representation from across Europe, but again I was disappointed at the turn out from the UK at an enterprise open-source software event, or perhaps I just didn’t meet those delegates.  As always the opportunity to network is as important as the arranged programme.

jBPM is undergoing reengineering at the moment so this was an important time to hold the event and to explain to the community what is being done.  Tom is clearly pleased with the emerging results of all this hard work and stressed the innovation and flexibility of the new process virtual machine (PVM) API.  jBPM and other teams are creating process definition executables for the PVM (jBPM’s is jPDL), but it was demonstrated that if one of the off-the-peg activities shipping with jPDL doesn’t fit then it will be straightforward for the developer to ‘roll their own’.  Acknowledging that there is not currently a standard for engine APIs Tom is not so keen that such a standard emerges in the short term.  He believes that jBPM has innovated and hopes to capture the advantages that arise from that.

As always open-source core developers and community members are nice people to hang out with.  Their passion about what they do, a strong belief in openness and transparency, genuine interest in and support for community, and lots of fun mark out open source culture from other ways of doing the business.  Interesting, given BPMs emerging importance to enterprise software architectures and business users, there were no women present.

jBPM is lightweight and embeddable and is installed as a workflow engine in other open source projects such as Alfresco.  The technology is oriented towards asynchronous architectures (which I took to be workflows), rather than web-services orchestration via ESB or automation/integration.

The console is possibly the way business users might first experience jBPM and there are plans in place to improve on what was originally only regarded as a demo of use of the API rather than something intended to be deployed.  Perhaps here lies an opportunity for a student at college looking for a final-year project to create a small name for themselves by designing an improved console – did anyone mention JRuby on Rails?

Paul Browne presented ‘off-topic’ on the drools rules engine.  I came away with a different understanding of rules engines than that I had before I went in and on this point alone the journey was made worthwhile.

Continental Europe seem to a be a strong area for jBPM perhaps because of the projects anchor in Belgium.  A regular meet-up is held in Benelux, so anyone who missed the Community Day and wants to get involved with the community can get along to these sessions.  The next one does look rather good … can I persuade my wife to allow me yet another trip away?

Thanks for the jBPM team for providing me with the excuse for a long overdue visit to Dublin.  Finally regards to my new contacts at Intesys, who humoured me while I pontificated in teh pub about virtual SaaS … more on that on a forthcoming blog post.

Person Paul Browne

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jBPM Community Day

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/jbpm-community-da

I’m off to the jBPM Community Day in a couple of weeks.  Looking forward to some good crack and some good beer since it is taking place at the Guinness Storehouse.

Anyone travelling down from the North East of England get in touch.  Perhaps we can meet-up and I can convince you why you get involved with open-source-network

OS BPM / Restful BPM

jBPM had a ‘quiet’ relaunch last month and the results look impressive.  Previously, as I come at BPM from a business analyst direction, I’ve always found jBPM quite challenging and was more successful in designing and deploying processes with Intalio.  However, the recent jBPM changes persuade me to re-examine the jBoss offering.

The most obvious change is the website.  I’ve also always found the documentation for jBPM challenging since it seemed out of step with the product, so I hope that there have been efforts to sort that out to.  However the most important change is the launch of the Process Virtual Machine.  This is a generic embeddable engine capable of running executables written in BPEL, jPDL, XPDL, pageflow and other languages as and when the extensions are created.

Another change is the link-up between jBoss and Bull.  Bull are the power behind 2 open source business process products – Nova Orchestra and Nova Bonita.  The relationship sees jBoss having oversight of Process Virtual Machine and the jPDL extension, and Bull overseeing Orchestrate as the BPEL extension and Bonita the as XPDL extension for the PVM.

BPMN is establishing leadership status in terms of process design and Intalio’s Eclipse based designer is probably the best current offering in that respect, but there are some strings attached.  Firstly, whilst it is based on Eclipse it isn’t OSS and it isn’t available as an Eclipse plug-in.  Neither does it accept other Eclipse plug-ins.  This means, for example, you cannot use IBM’s excellent graphical XForms editor within Intalio’s designer.  You also have to have an account on the Intalio website since it asks for a login when you first fire it up.  Whilst an account is free this is annoying.

jBPM’s Graphical Process Designer is available as Eclipse plug-ins, but it currently doesn’t support BPMN.  The same is true of ActiveBPEL Community Edition Designer.  Perhaps the final important OSS project on the design side is Eclipse itself, with the Java Workflow Tooling Project (JWT).

I’ve not looked at JWT, but if it supports BPMN and evolves to ‘good enough’ then that will be sufficient for me to move from Intalio Designer.

The link-up between jBoss and Bull reflects the broader rationalisation of the BPMS space.  Today there are probably only 3 serious OSS BPEL engines to consider: Apache Ode, Process Virtual Machine and ActiveEndpoints.

This segment has a need to simmer for a little longer before we have a usable stack for an analyst such as myself that is both open source and can be freely downloaded, that supports design using BPMN, and that has a portable workflow (as opposed to BPEL) technology.

At the moment I’d wish to design in Intalio and deploy to PVM.  But PVM doesn’t support BPEL4People, so workflow would break.  jBoss’s workflow is within jPDL, but that means using GPD for design, which means moving away from BPMN.  As an analyst I’m driven from the BPMN rather than the engine side of things.

Of course all the previous discussion is about Java-based technology and the web-services way.  Very heavy and very corporate.  Now that’s OK for someone like me who is more researcher than practitioner, since my interest is in understanding how to assemble future applications.

But on this matter I think web-services are not the way to go, and web resources are.  Which makes all of my previous comments pretty redundant since none of these products supports processes built with resources rather than services.  There is talk within the Apache ODE project of doing so, but when and if this might happen and, for that matter, how, is anyones guess.

There have been a number of blog posts on Restful BPM (orchestration) over the past few months [here, here].  The project I continue to keep an eye on is openWFEru or rufus.  Firstly, because it’s Ruby, secondly because they have a resource focus, thirdly because it’s from the workflow rather than the EAI side of BPM, and fourthly because it’s embeddable (like PVM).

Which is where I’m headed today.  I’ve an idea for a SaaS product that needs workflow.  Using RoR, with rufus, and putting it onto Amazon’s ‘cloud’ (is that enough buzzwords in one sentance?), seems to be a solid plan.  But I need to be able to get my head round rufus first.