My experience to promote jBPM on a large scale project

[fmarchioni]

Dear all,
sorry for pestering so much the forum today :-)
Not talking about bugs but I'd like to share "commercial" thoughts about jBPM. I have completed an analysis for re-engineering a BPM application which is using the old Oracle Workflow tool.

Though I have been able to explain to the management that jBPM is a layer to your processes written in Java which makes it quite flexible, scalable, easy to integrate with a mix of systems via the Service Bus etc. etc. critics came about the graphical interface of jBPM-plugin which is poor.

The Java 2D graphics isn't much exciting and it's not easy to draw very large processes with the Eclipse plugin, worse then all, all the Nodes are drawn with the same square icon while on huge workflows every kind of node has a different icon and that's important because the User can understand much better the workflow when the icons are comprensive and clear.

Ok, you can use every kind of editor to draw your process and let the developer translate into into jPDL's XML.

Ok but at runtime ? ok do you show your workflow using the same graphics ? and most important you should be able to interact with the workflow for example clicking on Nodes you might get info / unlock a Node etc.

I have suggested to invest a little of the budget on creating a plugin (written in Flash since they like silly nice-looking gadgets :-) ) that draws an interactive client for the Workflow, based on the jPDL and the Process runtime data.

Yet the management is not quite convinced about jBPM and honestly speaking some critics about the graphical interface I think are true, or at least appear true for the basic user.

What do you think about it ?
Thanks for your time
Francesco

[salaboy21]

I'm agree with you with some thoughts ... but remember that jBPM is not an End User Product.. I think right now is only a framework for developers... thats why we have this plug in to eclipse that is also developer tool...

[koen.aers]

Hi Francesco,

Thanks for your feedback. We are aware of most of the things that you bring on the table and are working to ameliorate support for these in the next generation of the GPD.
The idea is that nodes and figures are pluggable and can be easily contributed to the plugin by a user. This is a work in progress.
In the meantime, you should realize that jBPM was indeed envisioned in the beginning as a developer tool with embeddability and extensibility as the main focuses. That in contrast with other vendors products which are more difficult to integrate in your own applications.

Regards,
Koen

[clandestino_bgd]

Hi Koen,

The idea is that nodes and figures are pluggable and can be easily contributed to the plugin by a user. This is a work in progress.

That is something I also need, in my case, for exporting apache UIMA components as GPD nodes. UIMA has eclipse based editor, so what I 'd think would be to allow from GPD side to create library e.g "UIMA library" and to add UIMA nodes into it. (nodes can be prepared on-fly in self made UIMA export plugin). Each node can have different sets of input or outputs, therefore it cannot be one generic node.

I checked GPD JIRA and I did not find anything similar to that.
Do you have any idea, if and yes, when it can be expected roughly speaking?

Thanks for your answer,
Milan

[kukeltje]

Milan,

I think it can... have a look at how the ESB 'node´ is implemented. It is based on a generic node in jPDL, but in the GPD it has its own properties pane

[koen.aers]

Hi Milan,

Ronald is right. You can already contribute generic nodes with specific input and output properties to the GPD in its current state. However, it is not so easy. The best approach is to start from the plugin.xml of the GPD and to look at how it is done for the ESB node.

If you are interested in all this, I am currently working together with Kris from the Drools team to distill a unified 'flow' editor with pluggability as one of the main requirements. Take a look at the following SVN locations:
- http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk/flow/plugins/org.jboss.tools.flow.common
- http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk/jbpm/plugins/org.jboss.tools.flow.jpdl4
- http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk/drools/plugins/org.jboss.tools.flow.ruleflow

Feedback is warmly welcomed.

Regards,
Koen