Hot Deployment of Process Archives

[tlberglund]

Is there a way to make process archives hot-deployable in JBoss? I heard this claimed at a recent JUG meeting, but no examples were given. I am running jBPM 3.0 in JBoss 3.2.4 as a SAR.

The end goal isn't necessarily hot-deployable PARs as much as it is a sensible way to manage the deployment of PARs in production, apart from ready access to fancy tools like the Graphical Process Designer. It would be nice if I could package individual business processes and update them in production in isolation from one another. Any suggestions along these lines are most welcome.

Tim

[kukeltje]

afaik, this is not a jboss issue, but a jbpm issue. And afaik jbpm can already do this. not via a webui or something, but from ant tasks it is possible.

Do you mean a 'process management/versioning ui' when you refere to 'manage the deployment of PAR's in production?

[tlberglund]

Ronald:

What I seem to recall hearing about was a way to drop a PAR file in the deploy directory (or something under it), and have the process auto-deploy from there.

Taking the Ant task approach (which I now am, sort of), this becomes exclusively a jBPM issue, like you said. I wasn't sure ahead of time if the hypothetical automagic deploy feature might have used JBoss' deployment scanner, though, so I had the two products joined at the hip.

What I was looking for doesn't totally make sense to me upon further reflection. JBoss would have no concept of "deploying" a PAR, since (if I am not mistaken), it only deploys things which have some J2EE-defined concept of Being Deployed. (Not counting SARs, which are special. :))

Somewhat separately, is there a definitive reference for the PAR file format anywhere online? I've read section 13.1 in the documentation, but some questions remained (like how to package code in a PAR).

Tim