How are ESB and jBPM related?

[wsjboss]

It seems that ESB and jBPM cover similar application areas. How are they related, or how are they going to become related (if at all)?

--Wolf

[marklittle]

Not really. Roughly speaking, jBPM is about the coordination of disparate tasks into an overall business process. The ESB is about (and again, this is rough - check out the ESB docs on labs.jboss.com for more information) SOA, message routing, service deployment and management etc. It's an infrastructure that something like jBPM could use to conduct its work (though jBPM does not need ESB).

Mark.

[wsjboss]

The obvious follow-up question: What would jBPM gain if using ESB as service infrastructure instead of what it currently uses?

[marklittle]

An ESB provides service management, deployment, versioning, message translation etc. All sorts of things you won't find out-of-the-box with jBPM I believe.

[kukeltje]

exactly.... and all kinds of connections to services with protocols not supported by jBPM. Developing a generic actionhandler for accessing services on the esb is on the todo list for jBPM.

Ronald

[marklittle]

+1

ESB and jBPM are complimentary technologies, which can be used in isolation if necessary.