FYI: abstract is below. The link is http://www.jugs.ch/html/events/2007/jboss.html
re you considering developing a homegrown workflow engine? Then you should definitely attend this session first. Java Process Definition Language (jPDL) is a language for expressing long-running processes. Unlike most orchestration technologies, jPDL focuses on plain Java technology and includes sophisticated task management capabilities. Attendees learn in which scenarios jPDL is more appropriate than BPEL or other process languages.
Human tasks and other forms of wait states are typically quite a hassle in server-side programming. Developers have to think in terms of requests and manually maintain the user tasks in a database. In the structure of a server-side application, it's very hard to get a picture of the overview. jPDL gives you back that overview. Handling an insurance claim, submitting and handling an expense note, or going through a lawsuit are good examples of long-running processes. jPDL allows users to express the overall execution of these processes in terms of the JavaBeans architecture, user tasks, and other forms of wait states. These processes can be edited and viewed graphically. jPDL leverages the unified expression language (EL) to easily bind your POJOs to the process flow, and it leverages Hibernate to store the state of the long-running processes in the users' database.
On the one hand, jPDL has all the required features for business process management (BPM), but on the other hand, jPDL is also designed to fit like a glove on standard and enterprise Java applications. Ease of use for developers on the Java platform is often neglected in BPM offerings, and jPDL solves this problem.
Tom Baeyens is the founder and lead developer of JBoss jBPM, the leading open source workflow management system. He participated for JBoss in the expert groups JSR207 "process definition for java" and JSR208 "java
